Right To Affordable Education For The Beleaguered Service Class And Ordinary People
Rajiv Upadhyay 
Last ten to fifteen years have been a very trying time for the service class / middle class . In last ten years the government has made service class really a poor class by elimination of subsidies one one hand and increasing the taxes particularly the GST on every item consumed by the service class . The most savage was the GST on medical insurance .
The tax relief under new scheme was misleading as due to some directed relief available in old scheme , middle aged service class people chose to stay in old scheme but was denied any tax relief to compensate for the GST while the corporate sector was favoured by tax reduction and poor were given free ration and other subsidies. A few years back it was shown that the average tax paid by the service class was Rs 75000/yr compared to Rs25000/ paid by others . The shopkeepers , chartered accountants , lawyers and self employed people increased their charges not possible for service class . But service class paid higher income tax on even the dearness allowance . The worst was denial of dearness allowance for Covid period .
Why only the service class bear the burden of government subsidies to poor or covid vaccine .
The worst has been the increase in educational cost. While the jobs have vanished and the salaries have become half or even less, in real purchasing power . Earlier an IIT graduate could pay back the loan with one/ two year salary . Now it needs four to five years to payback the loan . Service class who have no business connections do not have the capital to start a business nor they have the business experience or acumen . They depend on job . Starting a business with bank loan when one is already having the burden of educational loan is suicidal . Coaching expenditure makes it worse for poor parents . Limited relief available for children of parents having less than one lakh rupee income is not relevant for service class .
To be precise from 2010 to 2024 IIT fees for B.Tech has gone up from two lakh to eight lakh rupees and for private colleges from 2.75 lakh to fifteen lakh rupees . The average salary for trainee engineers in big IT companies has remained at the same level of Rs 3-3,5 lakh rupees . In 2025 now open advertisement recruiters are offering only Rs 2,5 lakh annual salary . The fees for IIM / Ahmedabad MBA course is about Rs 22-25 lakh rupees .
The jobs with even low salaries are not available . The IIT placement in 2024 was only 62 % . The news paper reports about a few fancy salary packages were planted to hide the grim reality.
Therefore the salary class needs affordable education again . In 1967 , when I joined IIT / Kanpur , my fees was only Rs 25/- month . The total expenditure was about Rs 150/ month . The class was full of students of ordinary service class parents . The entire merit list of Delhi Board or UP Board used to be full of children of ordinary service class people . Coaching was not so essential . Today fifty percent of the students in IIT are from coaching classes thus adding extra expenditure for parents .
It is time the high tax paying service class is given the right to affordable education by
- Reducing fees in engineering and medical colleges .
- Giving interest free educational loan not to be repaid if salary after education is less than 25 % of the loan value.
- A standard deduction of Rs 2.5 lakh per child up to two children in college .
this is the bare minimum the shopkeeper’s government can do to compensate the service class for the highly exploitative time in last ten years .
