The Indian government has rejected a proposal by a review committee to increase tuition by almost 400 percent, to $5,482 a year from $2,096, at the globally renowned Indian Institutes of Technology, reports the Indian Express. The committee was set up by the government to make recommendations on how the engineering schools, which are government-financed but the most autonomous public higher-education institutions in India, can become financially independent.

Kapil Sibal, India’s minister in charge of higher education, said the fee increase would have been a “deterrent” to aspiring students, a ministry source told the newspaper. Other directors at the Council of the Indian Institutes of Technology, the top decision-making body for the institutions, said the committee’s suggestion for how to achieve financial autonomy was too simplistic and would be difficult to sustain, The Times of India reports. The committee has been asked to rework the tuition structure by taking into account the educational aspirations of all economic sections of the population.