Federation of Colleges Urges Telangana CM to Release Fee Reimbursement Dues

Hyderabad:The Federation of Professional and Degree Colleges submitted a representation to Chief Minister A. Revanth Reddy on Tuesday, urging the release of fee reimbursement dues that have been pending since 2021.

According to the federation, the previous BRS government failed to clear the dues for students from 2020-21 to 2023-24, resulting in arrears exceeding `6,000 crore. They highlighted that engineering students who enrolled in 2020-21, relying on the fee reimbursement scheme, had completed their four-year course but their dues were yet to be cleared.

The federation informed the Chief Minister that the backlog of dues had left many colleges unable to pay salaries to their teaching staff for months. If the salary arrears are not cleared by Dasara, teaching staff at professional and degree colleges may stop taking classes, the federation said.

Federation representatives T. Jayapal Reddy and Nagaiah Chowdhary explained that the previous BRS government had issued tokens for `1,200 crore before the Assembly elections last year to address some of the outstanding dues, but no actual funds were released.

The federation also brought to the CM's attention that college managements had taken large loans to continue operations in the absence of government payments. Many of these colleges are now defaulting on their loan repayments, leading banks to classify them as non-performing assets (NPAs) and issuing recovery notices. Several colleges are also facing cheque bounce cases.

Additionally, the federation said, managements were struggling to pay property taxes, employee provident fund (EPF), employee state insurance (ESI), income tax (I-T), tax deducted at source (TDS), university affiliation fees, and inspection fees from regulatory bodies such as the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) and the Pharmacy Council of India (PCI).

The federation requested that the Chief Minister ensure the release of `1,200 crore before Dasara in October, for which the tokens had already been issued by the finance department.