Of the Rs 11.5 lakh total fee, Rs 9 lakh is the tuition fee, Rs 2.5 lakh is “non-tuition fee” which includes expenses on accommodation, meals, books and computers.

Based on the income distribution of last year’s class, about 65% of the students would benefit from this fee waiver scheme, IIMA director Sameer Barua told The Indian Express on Thursday night.

Those students whose annual family income is between Rs 2 lakh and Rs 6 lakh, the percentage of tuition waiver will be worked out in a graded manner.

A corpus of Rs 7.5 crore has been kept aside for the tuition waiver and Rs 1 crore for non-tuition fee waiver.

These new measures come in because between 2005 and 2008, IIMA’s track-record, based on figures accessed by The Indian Express, shows that it could not spend even Rs 1 crore that was earmarked for scholarships each year.

So even as the fees in IIM-A steadily increased, from Rs 1.58 lakh in 2005-06 to Rs 2 lakh in 2007-08, funds disbursed on account of scholarships as well as the number students who benefited, declined.

Said Barua: “The disbursal was very poor because the ceiling on the household income was too low. Now with the increase in income limit, we are hopeful that we will be able to disburse the entire amount of Rs 8.5 crore. The tuition waiver is an out-of-the-box idea.”

According to figures for the last three years, the number of recipients of scholarships dipped from 97 in 2005-06, to 69 in 2006-07 and 49 in 2007-08. Correspondingly, the amounts too dipped from Rs 64.8 lakh (2005-06) to Rs 48.3 lakh (2006-07) to Rs 39.3 lakh (2007-08).