For the past three days, the students of the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, Delhi have been protesting against the administration, asking it to make the course fees affordable. Even though a meeting between the administration and the students was held on Wednesday, the latter say that it didn't yield a proper solution.
The students' set of demands include affordable education, better hostel and mess facilities. They also said that if the administration failed to meet their demands and doesn't come up with an affordable fee structure, they would soon start a hunger strike. In this scenario, we decided to explore how expensive media education is, at the top journalism schools in India.
IIMC doesn't offer its students a master's degree, but a Post Graduate Diploma in five different disciplines. The most expensive of the lot is PG Diploma Course Radio & TV Journalism, which costs students Rs 1,60,000. The next expensive course is PG Diploma Course in Advertising and Public Relations, which costs Rs 1,23,000. PG Diploma Course in Journalism (English) and PG Diploma Course in Journalism (Hindi) both cost Rs 87,000. PG Diploma in Journalism (Odia/Urdu/Marathi/Malayalam) costs Rs 47,000 a year.
A few other private institutes in the country too offer the same courses. Indian Institute of Journalism and New Media (IIJNM), Bengaluru offers PG Diploma in 3 disciplines — Print, Broadcast and Multimedia. It costs a student Rs 4,35,000 to study broadcast and multimedia journalism. Print journalism, on the other hand, costs Rs 4,15,000. On top of that, the students here pay a housing fee of Rs 31,000 and mess fee of Rs 1,05,000.
The fee structure is quite similar in Chennai's Asian College of Journalism. The institute offers PG Diploma in four disciplines — Print, TV, Radio and New Media. The Television stream is the most expensive here, costing Rs 4,48,000. All other streams cost Rs 4,42,000. The food and accommodation fee here ranges between Rs 1,45,000 and 1,80,000.
A PG Diploma course in Journalism in Mumbai's Xavier Institute of Communication costs Rs 3,25,230. Apart from Journalism, it also offers courses in Public Relations and Corporate Communication for Rs 2,63,870 and Film, Television & Digital Video Production Rs 3,77,150.
