West Bengal has ordered its universities not to charge application fee this year from students for undergraduate courses in affiliated colleges, a move that has put the institutions in a fix as they are not sure how to refund the amount already collected.
Since the admission process is completely online because of the COVID-19 situation, almost all colleges have spent a substantial amount on software, which they were hoping to recover through the application fee. Colleges, depending on their stature, typically charge between ₹100 and ₹300 for each application.
“The admission process began on August 10, and the government order came only on August 13. By then about 3,000 students had already applied for different courses and we had charged ₹100 per application. Now we are at a loss how to initiate the refund process, or whether we should refund at all, considering the order came late,” said a faculty member closely associated with admissions in her college — she did not want herself or her college to be named.
“For the last few years we have been depending on external software vendors, and this year we spent more than ₹1.5 lakh on admission software and allied services. Colleges that do not have the means will find it difficult to meet such expenses without collecting a nominal registration fee,” she said.
A cumbersome process
For the colleges, it won’t be just about parting with the sum already collected but also taking up an additional burden because returning the money to each applicant is going to be a cumbersome process.
Many colleges have put out a notice saying refund “will be made as per government order”. In other words, while the State government has ordered that “no charges shall be taken from students for scanning/uploading of documents for online admission and for providing application form/prospectus”, it has not yet said anything on whether or how the colleges should refund the amount.
The August 13 order was preceded by a poorly-worded order on August 11, which had asked universities “to ensure that individual candidates should not be charged up to maximum ₹150 only...” Realising that it had only caused confusion, Education Minister Partha Chatterjee put out a video message saying universities had been asked not to charge applicants and followed it up with the August 13 order.