Hyderabad, October 28: Is the online procedure of administering fee-reimbursement a way of edging out some beneficiaries? This is the question troubling the minds of thousands of students who have registered themselves for engineering courses anticipating release of funds by the State Government.
Barely 24 hours after Chief Minister K Rosaiah announced the online fee reimbursement scheme, thousands of students have aired their misgivings in no uncertain terms.
“I cannot understand why the Government has taken this decision to implement the scheme entirely in the online mode. Earlier, students needed to apply by filling online forms and the fee was deposited manually in their respective accounts.
Now they don’t know what exactly is happening,’’ a student union leader, Narsireddy said, and added that the move would prove a disaster, especially in the wake of the failure of web-based counselling in Eamcet-09.
Even though the government has announced that money would be deposited by November 31 for last year’s beneficiaries, students have their doubts.
And, when contacted, college managements too have said there was no clarity on the part of the government, despite the chief minister’s reassurance that the scheme would be implemented effectively.
“To my knowledge, the procedure has not started. And it is not clear whether the delay is due to lack of funds or to technical glitches,’’ said the managing director of a group of professional institutes.
Meanwhile, the website developers of the fee-waiver scheme (www.sbms.ap.gov.in), which is outsourced to a private informatics company, have disclosed that the servers which they were currently using were not able to handle the magnitude of data. “With an additional sanction of Rs 2.5 crore we will procure more servers.
Once the hardware is thus updated there will be no more problems,’’ said a team member, who maintained that there were no software glitches.
Apart from the technical aspects, there is a social element that has piqued some students — the possibility of the inclusion of economically-backward classes. “It is very easy to procure an income certificate and anyone can apply for this fellowship.
At a time when the government is reportedly facing financial crunch, this move would prove to an additional burden and some beneficiaries might be excluded,’’ All-India Student Federation leader Srujan Kumar told Express. He also demanded a more transparent procedure for the scheme.
Meanwhi le, the protest staged by AISF members at Samkshem Bhavan at Masab Tank today took a violent turn with police using force to disperse the students. Several student leaders were beaten up and arrested.
—Agencies