The Education Promotion Society for India (EPCI), which represents over 300 private universities and 3,000 colleges, has urged the government to remove GST on higher education.
At a press conference here on Thursday, G Vishwanathan, founder of VIT, said, “Various committees in the past have suggested that the quality of education should go up and its costs should come down. As it is the students which ultimately bear the brunt, we want the government to remove GST from higher education.”
Many committees in the past have suggested that the government should spend more than 6 per cent of the GDP on the education. However, India has never crossed 4 per cent limit even when there are over 80 countries around the globe that spent more than 6 per cent on education, he said.
“In a country, where lot of people opt out after primary education, putting the sector under the GST is likely to have a negative impact. We want the poor to be helped by the government instead of making them pay more taxes”, said Vishwanathan.
On planning to hold a protest against GST on higher education he said, “Our aim is to make an appeal to the government; we don’t want to agitate because as much as we want to educate our students, we also want them to be disciplined”.
There are 14 crore children in the country under the eligible age of higher education (18-23 years), out of which only 2.5 crore are in the higher education system in 800-odd universities and 40, 000 colleges.
Prashant Bhalla, Chancellor of Manav Rachna University, aid, “We are expected to give good quality in academics but because of GST now we can either save on the outsourcing cost or save the fees. To save outsourcing we will have to start running transport ourselves, canteen ourselves, by which we will get into mundane task which an educational institute should not get into”.