What does the Bill really plan to achieve?

The draft IIM Bill has two objectives. One is to declare certain institutes of management to be of national importance. The second is to empower these institutions to attain global standards of excellence in management.

The first one simply recognises the current objectives of the institutions. Thus, the Bill’s achievement, if any, will be purely in legal matters and not in practical affairs.  The second objective implies that empowerment of the institutes will enable them to achieve global standards of excellence. That raises the question whether administrative powers are inadequate for achieving global standards.  

Standards of excellence are determined by the quality of teachers and students, and the creative environment in which they address societal issues and contribute to their resolution. 

An acute problem is the shortage of good faculty, which is hurting research more than teaching. Faculty time for research has been reducing because of the rapid increase in annual intake for post-graduate programmes and the increase in long-duration programmes for mid-career executives.

Another dimension is the research culture. The careers of many current senior faculty members have emerged from significant contributions to case writing and case research, which was thus far considered relevant and good to adapt received wisdom to the uniqueness of the Indian economic and social environment. Understanding the practical issues faced by practitioners in the planned and controlled economic environment of India enabled better teaching. Research output in terms of papers published in quality journals was not easy with this approach but was recognised as an added element of distinguished faculty.

From the 1980s, the research culture in developed countries was moving towards research publications in approved journals. There was less emphasis on whether the research was immediately relevant to practitioners or enhanced the quality of teaching. With India opening its economy, Indian research culture is also slowly moving in this direction. But can this convergence and excellence be speeded up with higher administrative power?

Time and leadership are required. Care has to be taken not to lose the emphasis of the Indian heritage on context. For, increasingly contextual understanding of managerial problems is being recognised as extremely important for both teaching and research.

The Bill shows no understanding of how to attain international excellence. It primarily reallocates administrative power between the board and the government, and adds a role for the President of India as Visitor and for a political head of an inter-IIM coordination forum for all IIMs. As in a typical university, the Bill envisages no role for the Academic Council in research. The Academic Council has only a role in admissions, examinations and the teaching content. 

Would anything get worse if the Bill is not passed? Perhaps nothing. The older institutes have achieved a certain global reputation and ranking. An Act to recognise them as institutions of national importance will not improve their ranking on the criteria used by rating or ranking agencies.

Bill leads to control

The problem before the Bill is the problem of control and of providing scarce faculty resources to the new institutes. The bureaucracy sees the need for acquiring greater control over faculty resources of the better-off institutes. Centralisation of power to make overarching rules and a coordination forum headed by the minister would legitimise the making of such rules and regulations, applicable to all IIMs. And greater uniformity will give greater control. The Board’s powers are thus circumscribed by the ministry’s rules and regulations. The government will then have to take full responsibility for achieving global standards of excellence.

The Bill is totally inconsistent with the motto with which the current government got elected, namely, minimum government and maximum governance. An approach consistent with the election motto would restrict the role of the government to oversight of the Boards. The government should facilitate the Board’s overcoming of hurdles in their way to achieving shared goals of excellence.

The key is to attract good academic leadership for each IIM, which gives each institute a unique distinction with its own history, culture, context and resources. An institute close to mineral resources, for example, could specialise in teaching and research in mining management, international long term contract management. Finding suitable leadership and facilitating them would be a challenging role for the ministry.

 The history of IIMs shows that the 1960’s bureaucracy understood this. They helped well-chosen leaders to overcome hurdles. At a strategic level, the institutes got official recognition in functioning autonomously in geographical monopolistic jurisdictions of universities.

At an operational level, a way was found to overcome the hurdle of ridiculously low daily allowances for faculty for stay in expensive metropolitan cities while writing cases or doing research. The intangible costs underlying the Bill far outweigh the value it adds to the excellence of IIMs.

QUOTE HANGER

“Autonomy is at the core of flourishing of academic institutions. Government can definitely oversee the functioning of educational institutions from a distance but micro-management is never good. It makes people in the academic institutions feel disempowered.”
Ashish Nanda, Director, IIM-Ahmedabad


"Without an Act of Parliament, we will not be able to grant degrees and conduct PhD programmes. What is wrong in being accountable? If we spend public money, we better be answerable."
B S Sahay, Director, IIM-Raipur


“We welcome the initiative to confer formal status of Institutes of National Importance on IIMs through the proposed Bill. However, we suggest some clauses in the proposed Bill be modified to help IIMs retain certain dimensions of autonomy that have already been granted to us.”
Rishikesha T Krishnan, Director, IIM-Indore



(The writer is former Director, IIM-Bangalore and former Chairman, ISEC, Bangalore)