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Hyderabad: Private medical colleges in Telangana can charge MBBS students tuition only for the four-and-a-half-year academic course and not for the compulsory one-year internship that follows, the Telangana Admission and Fee Regulatory Committee (TAFRC) has clarified.

The committee also put colleges on notice over a second complaint, that some institutions were collecting money from students in the name of stipends without actually disbursing it. TAFRC said such practices, if found to be true, would be treated seriously and could invite strict action.

TAFRC’s clarification follows representations from students and parents alleging that certain private colleges were demanding fees for all five years of the MBBS programme, treating the internship year as chargeable like the rest.

Some complaints went further, alleging that students who did not pay up were kept out of classes, denied examination hall tickets and biometric attendance, and in some cases stopped from entering the college premises altogether.

National Medical Commission’s guidelines prevent internship fee

The committee grounded its clarification in the National Medical Commission’s guidelines from April 2026, which state that the internship year cannot be billed for since it does not amount to academic teaching.

TAFRC illustrated the permissible fee structure with sample calculations. A college with an annual fee of Rs 13 lakh, for instance, can collect a total of Rs 58.50 lakh across the course. A college charging Rs 14 lakh a year can collect up to Rs 63 lakh in all.

For a college with a Rs 14.50 lakh annual fee, the ceiling works out to Rs 65.25 lakh, arrived at by charging the full annual fee for each of the first four years, plus half that amount for the additional six months that make up the four-and-a-half-year course.