IIMs under siege

09 February 2004

The government's populist agenda of forcing the IIMs and other business schools to slash their rates in line with its recommendations, just ahead of elections, may soon usher in their decline. A report by Uday Chatterjee

HRD minister Murli Manohar Joshi's agenda for the Indian Institutes of Management and the Indian Institutes of Technology is hardly as hidden as his party's agenda, which dodges in and out from behind the National Democratic Alliance agenda. And what one can see of Joshi's agenda is not a welcome sight.

Joshi has made no bones about the fact that he wants more control over these institutions, if necessary by hostile means. Towards this end, he summoned the directors of the six IIMs last week and issued a fatwa declaring that the IIMs' annual course fee be reduced from Rs.1.5 lakh to Rs.30,000. Further, to establish that he would henceforth call the shots, Joshi ordered the six IIM directors to report compliance of his edict.

The HRD ministry in its order to the directors of the IIMs said that the decision of reducing the fee was taken after considering a recent Supreme Court ruling (on the fee structure for professional colleges) and a review of the U R Rao Committee's recommendations (on the intake of students in professional colleges).

It hardly mattered that Rao himself is reported to have stated that his recommendations were meant for institutes affiliated to the All India Council of Technical Education and not the IIMs or IITs. He clarified in Bangalore that his report pertained to the over-900 other management institutes and 1,200 engineering colleges in the country. What is worse is the denial of this report to the IIMs.