Defending Doctor Feel Good

The good Dr Murli Manohar Joshi should go all the way in reducing Indian Institute of Management (IIM)fees. He should abolish them altogether.

The six IIMs have a total of 1,200 seats this year. At today's Rs 1.5 lakh per seat, the total feecollection is Rs 18 crore. At the reduced level of Rs 30,000 per seat, which the good doctor is imposing, itwill be Rs 3.6 crore.

The good doctor has committed to plug the gap of Rs 14.4 crore, never mind the obstructionists in theMinistry of Finance. He can comfortably plug the balance Rs 3.6 crore as well. It's a mere trifle, an amountlost in the rounding-off of his ministry's monthly expense statement. The maintenance of his ministry's fleetof Ambassadors probably costs more.

No question about elitism, then. The IIMs will truly be affordable to all.

The more serious issue is the vituperation that is flying around. Consider the allegation that the gooddoctor wants to control the corpus built up by the IIMs. Which leads on to a comparison with the sacking ofthe English monasteries by Henry VIII, or of the Somnath temple 400 years earlier. Patriotism demands that wejoin hands and distance the good doctor from such wild allegations.

Just see how unfounded the allegations are. The medieval raiders plundered established institutions oflearning in order to get their grubby hands on the accumulated wealth stored in their hallowed precincts -wealth resulting from the offerings of visitors and worshippers, and contributions from others who ascribedsuccess to their influence. In each case, a religious justification was created, a new doctrine dutifullytrotted out by captive propagandists, typically in the name of religion or the larger benefit of theirconstituents.

One was a plunderer, pure and simple. He kept his constituents happy by sharing the booty. The other, HenryVIII, was also impelled by a political agenda, one on which his regime's survival depended. Any parallel withthis year's elections should not be used to malign our good doctor.

The good doctor wants to control admissions, they say, and the power and patronage and lucre this entails.Stuff and nonsense! He wants to increase the admissions multifold. If seats are not available, he will rapidlypromise to create them. The capacity of the fabled IIMs will be doubled or more, the number of IIMs increasedtenfold or more, and a super-common entrance exam introduced. This will make admissions as transparent,leak-proof and non-elitist as for all courses in all our universities. In fact, some of the universities maywell be renamed IIMs, to take the quality of their output to new heights.

If truth be told, the timing is perfect.

The world's largest democracy, the world's fifth-largest GDP, eight per cent annual growth, the world'sInfotech workshop - all these are finally being appreciated across the world. Internally, we see India Shiningand undergoing change at a speed and depth unprecedented in history. The Planning Commission's Vision 2020document envisages employment opportunities for an additional 500 million people by the year 2020. If itsucceeds, this will be the largest transformation in human history. India will become the third largesteconomy in the world, and, with a workforce of 800 million people, the world's workshop and services centrefor enterprises way, way beyond the IT and BPO sectors. Seers are remarking on signs of this spread even asyou read these words.

What are the likely show-stoppers?

Two of them. First, such an upheaval needs careful nurturing and management, if the revolution is not toturn on its own. This calls for leadership, vision, foresight, entrepreneurship and systematic operationsmanagement. The catch is that the circumstances dictate high scale and rapid pace, or quickly getting vastnumbers of people to pull together in the same direction. It's a challenge in any environment. Here, inaddition to the management and leadership skills, effectiveness needs strong cultural sensitivity, somethingonly Indian residents can bring to bear.

The second possible block, following from the first, is the demands on our educational system. We alreadyface a crippling shortage of trained managers, but this is nothing compared to the demands ahead of us. Wegenuinely need those thousands of MBAs envisaged by the good doctor. Plus, the implementation of Vision 2020will need constant induction of new disciplines to deliver recurrent retraining of the existing workforce aswell as creation of new specialists.

So, the demands on the educational infrastructure are going to be far beyond anything planned or underimplementation. Do we provide for these resources ourselves, or post-WTO do we meekly surrender to the influxof foreign universities with the knowledge bases and the consequent dollar prices? Prices that will make thecurrent debate a cruel joke, Nero fiddling while Rome burned?

Let's go back to fundamentals.

Let's backtrack from higher education, or even school education, to the very first step, namely literacy.Let's note also that Vision 2020 hinges on full literacy, hardly an area of strength today. And when we toutour English skills as a powerful comparative advantage for the services business, let us also admit thatEnglish has been actively discouraged for years. Nor is it being actively promoted in today's educationalsystem. It needs to be built in at the mass level, just as China is doing in a determined bid to compete withus.

Do we have any counter to these threats?

Do we have realistic plans to seize the opportunities? Doubtless the good doctor has outlined them in redin his daily list of things to do. For these are his responsibilities, and just because he does not publicisethem we should not assume he is devoid of the knowledge or insensitive to it. Have confidence in him, he willdefinitely be as dynamic about it as he has been about the fees for those 1,200 IIM students, and will gopublic on it as soon as he has completed his 5-year analysis (how time flies!) of the plans and implementationand resourcing and the other trivia it entails.

Trust the good Doctor to know there is life beyond the elections. Trust him to know that literacy is basic,that primary education is fundamental to continued Shining, that we need to produce managers and specialistsby the hundreds of millions. That we have to value our precious few role models and aspiration ideals, insteadof destroying them on the altar of short-term political gimmickry.

Trust him to appreciate the power and bounty that come from success and plenty, rather than from shortageand rationing. Trust him to realize that Shining brings Visibility and Competition and Detractors, andprevailing against them needs the finest professional managers any country can produce.

Trust him to be visionary rather than atavistic, to be a pioneer rather than a helpless victim ofcircumstance. Trust him to understand that we have a short window of opportunity, one we can all too easilysurrender by default.

Trust him to be a statesman. The alternative is too bleak to countenance.

Arun Dang is an IIMC alumnus.