The Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Calcutta is set to raise the fees for its flagship postgraduate programme in management from the next academic year.

To draw up a roadmap for fee-hike, the institute has set up a core committee with representatives from the board of governors and the faculty.

“The committee will submit its report in the next board meeting scheduled for February and the formal announcement of the fee hike will be made after the board gives its seal of approval,” said a IIM Calcutta source.

The revised fee for the two-year programme will be “somewhere between Rs 7 lakh and Rs 9 lakh”, said an official on condition of anonymity.

Last year, the IIM Calcutta authorities had decided to raise the fees for the two-year programme from Rs 4 lakh to Rs 7 lakh from the academic session starting 2008.

But the plan was dropped after a review committee, under the chairmanship of R.C. Bhargava, the former chief executive officer of Maruti Udyog, set up by the ministry of human resource development asked the IIMs to “hold back” the hike in fees.

“We were the only ones to reverse our decision and wait for the committee report before implementing the hike. All other IIMs went ahead with the hike,” said a source in Joka, adding that a fee-hike was now “necessary” to maintain the quality of education.

According to estimates, till last year, the institute was incurring a deficit of around Rs 1.5 lakh per student per annum. “As the situation was much the same for all the IIMs, the decision to revise fees was a collective call to bridge the gap between revenue and expenditure,” said the source.

The IIMs usually take collective decisions on fee hike, admission and increase in number of seats.

Though the directors of all the IIMs had decided to fix Rs 7.5 lakh as the ceiling for the fee hike, the boards of IIM Ahmedabad and Bangalore went in for a further hike, triggering an intervention from the ministry.

Following the missive from the ministry, IIM Calcutta decided to wait for the Bhargava Committee report and the students were charged Rs 3 lakh for the first year.

“We had told the students that the second-year fees would be communicated to them later,” said an IIM Calcutta official.

Officially, the second year starts from July and the first-year students are admitted around the same time.

With the ministry giving no clear directive on the fee structure, the IIM Calcutta authorities set up the review committee. “We cannot wait any further as the admission season is here,” said an IIM official.