When we discuss fee, we are mostly talking about the fee for higher education and higher education interestingly has been one of the things that India really focused on even from the time of independence and I think we have to give credit to the early government especially Jawaharlal Nehru for have thought of the fact that higher education institution are needed to build the future of the country and I don't think that any other country getting independence out of the colonial rule was thinking so far ahead and the kind of institutions like AIIMS, IITs, Delhi University, Jawaharlal Nehru University, etc that got built during that period are world class universities. I don't think that there are any post colonial countries that actually have that. Earlier, higher education was mostly state funded and was public education but even at that point of time school education that was provided by government was not high quality so while in the early years,good investment happens in higher education, I think in another decade after independence, secondary and primary education need to improve but that never happened. So you had a school system that gradually went into a state of collapse and because governments never invested into that what you begin to see in the last ten years is interestingly the fact that just the way govt schools went into disrepair from the past 30-40 years, it is now higher education provided by the government by the state that is also going into disrepair and the lot of this has to do with how much money has been invested into that public education. From the early 90s, the amount of money going into government schools suddenly reduces if you see the budget figure. Exactly the same thing started happening from the last 5- 10 years for higher education and that is the reason why education even in the government institutions such as IITs, IIMs are no longer easy to afford by the middle class families.

Atishi Marlena
Indian Politician (AAP), Educator, Political Activist and MLA