New Delhi: The Supreme Court today (Apr 16, 2004) acceded to the request of Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) to continue the dialogue process with the Government on the fee-cut decision and posted a petition challenging the decision to last week of July.

The petitioners wanted that the court should go into the merit of the petition and examine the HRD Ministry's February 5 order directing drastic reduction in the fees. But, the court chose to accede to the request of IIMs for deferment of the hearing.

IIM-A in its release said that the statement of Parekh before the media after the conclusion of the hearing was incorrect as the premier business school has all along maintained that it would first have a dialogue with the Government and if the dialogue fails, it would explore the options of legal remedy.

The apex court was informed by senior advocate Anil Divan that N R Naryana Murthy, chairman of IIM-A, has formed a negotiating committee comprising Jerry Rao, faculty member and chairman of NASSCOM (National Association of Software and Services Companies), B H Jajoo, faculty and Board member of IIM-A and Prof J R Verma, faculty member.

This committee has already began the negotiation process and has met Higher Education Secretary S C Tripathy in the HRD Ministry.

The IIMs stressed that no student of poor background has ever been turned away from the institute because of his economic incapability to pay the fees and has been given scholarships and loans to pay the fees.

Appearing for IIM-B, senior advocte C S Vaidyananthan said that reduction in fees would help only the rich students as their studies would be subsidised with the money from the public exchequer.