NRI-CIWG students being charged non-refunable double registration fee

Lokmat News Network

Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar: The parents of students who wish to take admissions to Engineering courses in the State under NRI and CIWG categories are worried over the disparity in registration fees. Each student is being charged a non-refundable double registration fee, which is up to 1200 USD (over Rs 1 lakh).

It may be noted that the centralised administration process for the different professional undergraduate and postgraduate courses is through the State Common Entrance Test Cell (SCETC).

The CET Cell also implements the admission process for students under Children of Indian Workers in Gulf Countries (CIWG), Non-Resident Indian (NRI), Overseas Citizen of India (OCI), Person of Indian Origin (PIO) and Foreign Nationals (FN).

It opened a separate link for these students' registration on the portal. Those students who are from the State have to pay a registration fee up Rs 1000 for Engineering. However, this year, students from CIWG, NRI, OCI, PIO and FN are being charged over Rs 1 lakh (1200 USD) just for the registration. Moreover, this amount is non-refundable.

Talking to this newspaper, Dr Rahul Ramesh Dehedkar (Muscat – Oman), a parent whose has registered for the Engineering admission, told this newspaper that when there is a centralised admission process, they were asked to register three times.

“We were asked to register on a portal by paying fees of Rs 2500 in April. Later, students were instructed to go to another link and pay 50 USD. For the third time, students were asked to register on the portal again and pay 1150 UDS (over Rs 1 lakh) as processing fees. If somebody wants to take admission at a national-level institute and cancel registration in Maharashtra, the registration fees are non-refundable. Local students have to register just once and they are also charged Rs 1000. Even top Engineering and technology schools in the country charge just 300 USD (Rs 25,000) for the registration,” he said. Parent of another student, Girish Chavhan, said that there is a huge discrepancy between the processing fees in Maharashtra and national-level institutes, as this would put an unnecessary financial burden on parents.

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Memoranda sent to Minister, CET Cell

A group of parents (400) sent memoranda to the Higher and Technical Education Minister Chandrakant Patil, CET Cell and Principal Secretary of the Higher and Technical Education Department. However, nothing was done yet. They also said that the total processing fees would be lost if the student did not get the choice of college or branch. They demanded to restructure it or bring it at least to the central level.