Today, Friday, December 29, the Students' Federation of India (SFI) claimed that the National Testing Agency (NTA) has raised the fee for 2024 CUET-PG application forms.
The student body's Delhi state committee claimed in a letter to NTA Director Subodh Kumar Singh that the fee increase is a "blatant attack" on higher education opportunities in the country.
It is "anti-student" and a step towards "privatisation" of education, SFI said.
The agency did not respond immediately to the letter or the claim of the CPI(M) students' wing, reports PTI. This was despite an SFI delegation meeting with HC Gupta, Senior Advisor at the National Testing Agency (NTA), urging him to reverse the "fee hike".
The NTA administers the Common University Entrance Test - Postgraduate (CUET-PG) for admission to postgraduate studies at universities across the country.
The SFI claimed in its statement that the NTA raised the charges for CUET-PG application forms by Rs 200 for all categories "due to a lack of funds", affecting mainly those from disadvantaged communities and backward regions.
"The NTA highlighted that enough funds are not being released, which is leading to such hikes," it said.
It claimed that the current fee for general category students is Rs 1,200; Rs 1,000 for students from economically weaker sections (EWS) and Other Backward Classes (OBCs); Rs 900 for scheduled castes and tribes (SC/ST); and Rs 800 for persons with disabilities (PwD).
"The SFI strongly opposes this logic and calls it out for being another step that the government at large is taking towards the complete privatisation of education," the SFI said in its letter to NTA Director Singh.
SFI members Mehina from Delhi University, Nadia from Jamia Millia Islamia University, Sagar from Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Vibhu from Ambedkar University comprised the delegation that met Gupta at the NTA headquarters.
In the same vein, student organisations All India Students' Association (AISA) and Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) emphasised the absence of Jawaharlal Nehru University from the list of colleges accepting CUET-PG 2024 application forms on the CUET website.
According to these student organisations, the university has now informed them that it is a technological fault that will be resolved within a few days.
