Ahmedabad: The Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A) has decided to implement the Other Backward Classes quota from this academic year onwards and there would be no rollback on the hiked fee structure announced, Samir Barua, director of the institute, said on Saturday.

Speaking to the media here after the IIM-A board meeting, Barua said there was no change in fee structure or any rollback. The IIM-A board had hiked fees in March-end for the first year to Rs.550,000 and for the second year to Rs.600,000 for the batch joining in June 2008.

The average fees for the OBC students in the "non-creamy" layer would come down due to the graded fee structure which has been introduced only by the IIM-A, he said. On admissions in the general quota, Barua said it was expected to begin from May 1, and added that it would take at least two weeks to implement the OBC quota.

IIMA is providing a graded fee structure keeping in mind poorer students and loans would be made available through the institute, Barua said. "We have held talks with four public sector banks and one private bank, and all have agreed to give the entire fee amount as loan with a moratorium that the fee repayment will begin at a later stage. There will be no margins and the loans come with an attractive rate of interest," he said.

"The problem for those parents whose annual income is less that Rs.250,000 has been taken care of since education loans have been arranged. One problem parents faced was on bringing a guarantor. Even this has been taken care. A student can now stand guarantor for another", Barua said.

For the first year (2008 batch) six per cent seats would be added in the OBC quota and a similar number also added in the general quota as per the court order. Six per cent of the total 280 seats works out to 17. So in the first year, IIM-A will have an extra 34 seats, Barua said. There would therefore be 314 seats for the Post Graduate Programme (PGP) and PGP Agri-business management(PGP-ABM) courses, he said.

The second year would see 6-15 percent hike in seats. The third year it would be 27 percent, Barua said. Apart from hiking fees, the IIM-A board had also decided to triple the annual family income limit from Rs.200,000 to Rs.600,000 for a student to be eligible for financial support. Graded need-based financial aid was also announced for eligible students who qualify for financial support.

Barua said that earlier the IIM-A had visualised that the fee waiver scheme would cost the institute Rs.85 million per year. "Now it will go further up", he said. To a question on why IIM-A raised its fee more than other institutes, Barua said that each institute had its own requirements and had to maintain its own corpus of funds.

"In '92-93 we had a corpus of Rs.135 crores (Rs.1.35 billion) which was all spent on infrastructure development like adding classrooms, dormitories etc." Asked if the Ministry of Human Resource Development would be happy with the IIM-A decision, he said "only time will tell". "We have acted well within our powers," Barua said. IANS