The National Medical Commission (NMC), the nation’s top medical education regulator, issued a directive in February directing private medical colleges to lower their tuition rates by 50% in order to compete with government universities. The memorandum included instructions regarding the fees structure of private medical colleges, including those that were part of recognised universities, many of which lacked fee control procedures. On Monday, the Association of Health Sciences Institutes filed a petition with the Supreme Court against the rules.

The memorandum includes two different instructions. According to the first rule, the fees should be comparable to that charged by government medical colleges (for 50% of the seats). And the second states that the fees should be fixed according to their given 25 principles.

The second part of the memorandum includes the different principles to be applied for fixing the fees of medical colleges. It decides what costs to include and cut-off. According to these guidelines, the fees for 50% of the students should be at par with the government medical colleges and the rest of the cost for running the colleges should be imposed on the rest 50% of the students.

Thus, according to the former head of Maharashtra’s medical education and research board Dr Pravin Shingare, NMC is indirectly trying to control the fees structure of 100% of the students which is illegal.

Now that the association of private medical colleges has petitioned the Supreme Court based on the Kerala high court order (which states that the NMC order will not be applicable in the state), there needs to be an interim order on whether the fee structure from last year should be adhered to until a decision on this petition is made.