ATTOCK, Nov 8: Hundreds of students from the Comsats Institute of Information Technology (CIIT) and their parents here on Saturday staged a protest demonstration against withdrawal of the tuition fee waiver and issuance of a deadline to deposit the dues.

The affected students, including girls, and their parents gathered outside the office of the district nazim to protest against what they said the unjustified decision to abolish the waiver of fee and the notice to deposit the dues of Rs12,000 per student by November 11.

They informed the district nazim that about 240 students from Attock were studying at the local campus and had been offered 100 per cent tuition fee waiver. When the campus was set up, it was decided that 50 per cent tuition fee wavier would be offered by the CIIT while the remaining 50 per cent would be borne by the district government.

It helped the local students to get IT education as they cannot afford heavy tuition fees ranging from Rs15,000 to Rs20,000 per month. But soon the 50 per cent tuition fee waiver offered by the CIIT was withdrawn and the burden was shifted to the students. Now the district government has also stopped paying the 50 per cent coverage saying funds were not allocated in the budget of the current year.

The students said they had been issued notices by the CIIT to pay the dues otherwise they would not be allowed to sit in their classes. They demanded that immediate measures should be taken to save their future.

Speaking to the students, the district nazim, Tahir Sadiq Khan, also expressed concern over the issue and said he was well aware of their problems. He said the subsidy amount for the 50 per cent waiver for the CIIT students was not reserved in the current budget of the district after the change of the provincial government.

He said the district government had already filed a writ petition with the Lahore High Court’s Rawalpindi bench against implementation of the budget prepared by the district administration instead of the one approved by the district government.

The nazim said the non-allocation of funds for the fee waiver of the CIIT students in the budget would also be placed before the LHC to consider it as a supplementary to the writ petition of the district government in the interests of students.