Red-Taped To Death?

The ministry has scrapped the existing procedure for nominating the chairman of the board of governors and the director for the IIMs. The two notifications sent by the ministry to all the IIMs on March 2 and March 15 are the first step to tightening the government’s grip on the IIMs.

Notification F.No.F.7-7/2001-TS.V-(1) states that since certain bottlenecks were noted in the existing procedure, the board chairman would now be chosen by the government. Till now, the chairman was nominated by the government from among names recommended by the board of the respective IIMs. The board had the liberty to suggest another candidate if the one suggested by it was not approved by the government. This entire process has now been done away with.

There has not been much opposition to this government move as the post of chairman is largely a decorative one. But the next notification, No.F.7-7/2001-TS.V(II), has a far more serious impact on the IIMs’ autonomy. It abrogates the board’s autonomy to appoint its own director. Now the government will set up its own Search-cum-Selection Committee to suggest names.

The committee’s composition indicates it will be a total babu affair. Chaired by a government nominee, its members will include two technocrats/educationists also nominated by the government, the HRD secretary, the special secretary (technical) and the joint secretary in charge of technical education. This raises the spectre of political appointees running the IIMs.

The ministry has actually reverted to a procedure scrapped in January 1994, following the recommendations of a committee headed by Dr Verghese Kurien, set up to suggest ways to reorganise the IIMs. Experts say this reversion strikes at the very root of the excellence of the IIMs—their independence.

The ministry lists its own reasons for going back to babus calling the shots. "The outgoing chairman and directors were part of the search committee. How could they take a fair decision if they are an interested party?" asks a senior bureaucrat in the ministry. IIM professors admit blunders were committed but do not see it as a strong enough reason to turn the clock back. "This procedural flaw—that interested parties were part of the selection process—could have been easily corrected. The government has just used this as an excuse to take a regressive step of tampering with IIMs’ autonomy," says an IIM Ahmedabad professor.

Says Jahar Saha, former IIM Ahmedabad director: "Both systems can give the same sort of persons if followed fairly. I don’t think there was any need to change the procedure." Adds an IIM Calcutta professor, "We only hope the saffron agenda is not forced on the IIMs."

But the move does not stop here. The ministry has shot off circulars to the IIMs to send their plans for the utilisation of their corpus funds. "The IIMs get huge grants from the government and the collective corpus fund of all IIMs is to the tune of Rs 450 crore. Further, the fee charged per student is over Rs 2 lakh. We need to know how they plan to utilise this vast corpus," says a senior bureaucrat.

An IIM alumnus championing the autonomy cause counters this line: "A recent exercise at one of the IIMs established that the institute can take care of its financial needs with absolutely no further support from the government. The institutes can repay the government corpus if the IIMs were to be corporatised and the government funds converted into some redeemable instruments."

But for now, if the adamant babus at Shastri Bhawan are to believed, the noose around the IIMs will only get tighter.