New Delhi, June 8: A council headed by HRD minister Prakash Javadekar has decided to increase the tuition fees of all courses at the Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISERs) by 10 per cent every year over the next three years.

Within a year of the last revision of the fees, the Council for the National Institutes of Technology and IISERs on May 26 approved a proposal for a fresh increase in a move likely to affect poor students.

According to the decision of the council, the fee per semester for the integrated Bachelor of Science and Master of Science (BS-MS) course will be increased from Rs 25,000 to Rs 27,500 in the coming academic session. It will go up to Rs 33,400 by 2019-20.

The tuition fee for each semester for the Integrated PhD and PhD courses will be revised incrementally from Rs 15,000 to Rs 20,000 in 2019-20. Last year, the IISERs had revised the fee for the BS-MS course from Rs 11,000 per semester to Rs 25,000.

An HRD ministry official said the council noted that the fees at the IISERs were low and there was a need to progressively increase them. So, the decision to hike the fees uniformly by 10 per cent every year over the next three years was taken.

However, the fee hike will be applicable only to students who will get admitted in the coming years.

There are seven IISERs in the country, including one in Nadia's Kalyani. These institutions admit around 1,100 students every year in the BS-MS course. The combined intake for the two PhD courses is around 350.

The fee hike may not affect the PhD students as they are covered by scholarships. However, about 20 per cent of the students in the BS-MS courses pay for their education expenses at the IISERs. These students will find it difficult to pay the hiked fees, a student of IISER Kolkata in Kalyani said.

The council also discussed the issue of the IITs not agreeing to common counselling with the IISERs for admission to undergraduate courses.

The council decided to issue a directive to the IITs to agree to the common counselling from 2018, sources said. The IITs are already holding joint counselling with the NITs.

The council also discussed the confusion over nomenclature of the BS-MS degree since it does not conform to the usual names approved by the University Grants Commission (UGC). Some BS-MS degree-holders are facing difficulty in getting jobs in Kerala.

The council decided to direct the UGC to include BS-MS in its degree-nomenclature notification.