Jamshedpur, April 21: Studying at XLRI will become heavier on the pockets.

Going the IIM way, XLRI also has announced a fee hike and the leap is nothing less than 17.95 per cent.

The hike will be introduced for 2009-2011 batch students of two of its flagship courses — postgraduate programmes in business management (BM) and personnel management and industrial relations (PM&IR).

The B-school authorities said the hike is to clear arrears of faculty according to the Sixth Pay Commission and a part of it will be kept for a scholarship fund of Rs 60 lakh that the institute plans to introduce soon.

Students will have to pay about Rs 1.34 lakh more than the previous batches for the same course. The previous batch (2008-2010) fee was Rs 7.5 lakh.

“We took the decision after much deliberation. The fee hike will help us to meet the payment of arrears and a part of it will go to the scholarship fund that we plan to set up,” said Father E. Abraham, the director of XLRI.

He said the fee hike would also help combat the rising inflation and introduce infrastructure improvements. Last year, too, the B-school went for a fee hike for better facilities, announcing a whopping 34 per cent increase for the same programmes. The students of the 2007-2009 batch had to pay Rs 5.17 lakh.

This year, the B-school had applied for the ISO 9001:2000 certification.

“Unlike the IIMs, XLRI does not receive any grants from the government, under such circumstances raising the fee becomes important to meet expenses like infrastructure development, adding more facilities and increasing payment of faculty,” said an official of XLRI.

The areas of expenditure are payment of salary, satellite, office and administration, admissions while the institute’s source of income are only student fees, admission tests and satellite programmes.

The management has also added some facilities for the faculty to conduct research and publish their work in form of books or articles.

But the news is not all that bleak at the B-school. From this session onwards, seats of PM&IR course would be increased by 50 per cent. For this, the institute has already got the green signal from the All India Council for Technical Education.

On being asked whether the increase in the fee structure will effect students, Father Abraham said: “I don’t think so, because if the student gets admission here he can apply for a bank loan. The IIMs, which are public institutions, charge much higher than the XLRI, and often double the fee we charge.”