A section of IIT-Kharagpur students are on hunger strike since Tuesday afternoon demanding the rollback of a registration fee hike they say is "unjustified".The decision of the hike, if enacted, would be effective from January 2017.They prevented the AIIT-KGP Director Partha Pratim Chakrabarti, Registrar Pradip Pyne, the dean of students and other senior officials from leaving their office last night.According to the protesters, the university authority has almost doubled the hostel fees and planned to increase the registration fees significantly.
"The hostel fee till last year was around Rs 8,000, that would become almost Rs 14,000 if the hike is implemented. This can be troublesome for the research scholars if their monthly stipend is not increased accordingly," a senior research scholar, who did not wish to be named, told IANS."The registration fee for each semester has also gone up from Rs 28,000 to Rs 37,000. This is a significant increase compared to the fee structure at other IITs in the country," he added.The protestors, mostly research scholars, plan to strike indefinitely until the director himself addresses them.