The protest to keep public education affordable that started at JNU has now moved to the Indian Institute of Mass Communication with students staging a protest against what they have called an “unaffordable fee structure”. A section of the students organised a protest on the campus to highlight the “high tuition fee and hostel and mess charges”.

“IIMC is the leading media institute in the country and is supposed to run on “no-profit, no-loss” basis, but the fee is sky-high here and increases at a rate of 10% every year. A fee of ₹1,68,500 for a ten-month course plus hostel and mess charges is unaffordable for a middle-class student, let alone a poor student,” the students said in a statement.

The fee per year for a course in Radio & TV Journalism is ₹1,68,500, for Advertising and PR it is ₹1,31,500, for Hindi Journalism, it is ₹95,500, ₹95,500 for English Journalism, and ₹55,500 for Urdu Journalism. Hostel and mess charges are around ₹6,500 for women and ₹4,800 for men per month, the students said. They also said that there were very few hostel seats and most students had to live outside the campus by paying very high rents.