The annual convocation in IIM Calcutta on Saturday. Picture by Bishwarup Dutta

Calcutta, April 5: The Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, has decided not to raise its fees yet.

The institute will plan a fresh increase based on the recommendations of the IIM review committee, expected to come around May.

IIMC’s board of governors, who met on the campus today, decided against announcing a fresh fee hike for the coming academic year.

“We have decided to retain the fees at Rs 3 lakh, as decided, for the first-year batch of 2008-2009. We will wait for the review committee report before we take a decision about increasing the fees further,” said Ajit Balakrishnan, chairman of the board.

The board has decided not to announce the fee for the second year of the two-year postgraduate course, which it had fixed at Rs 4 lakh, before getting the recommendations.

The review committee is chaired by R.C. Bhargava, former managing director of Maruti Udyog. It will review the functioning of the IIMs, the per-student cost for each of them and offer guidelines for deciding the fees.

The institute, which had on February 26 decided to raise its fees to Rs 3 lakh for the first year and Rs 4 lakh for the second, revisited the decision in the light of steep increases announced by the IIMs in Ahmedabad and Bangalore. But the board thought it would unfair to raise the fee “opportunistically”.

“We have to remember that we are a public institution and it would be wrong to unilaterally increase our price as it would be opportunistic,” said Balakrishnan.

According to the chairman, the course fee is just one-third of the total earnings of the institute and an increase or decrease in fees will not “make or break it”.

The directors of the six IIMs had decided to peg the increased fee for the two-year course at Rs 7.5 lakh, as reported by The Telegraph on Friday. But IIM Ahmedabad raised its fees to Rs 11.5 lakh and Bangalore to Rs 8 lakh.

“The hikes implemented by IIM Ahmedabad and Bangalore were a breach of agreement and will definitely hurt the effort to build an IIM brand. It shows lack of co-operation and each IIM will work in their own way unless the MHRD and the review committee make efforts to re-establish the co-operation,” said Ashish Bhattacharyya, chairman, admissions, IIM Calcutta.