During my long innings as the editor of the country’s first two business magazines and for the past decade in education journalism, although the country’s ABC (Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Calcutta) Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) have been a regular beat, I have had an unsatisfactory relationship with these pioneer B-schools. After every interaction with them, I returned to base with the feeling that their directors and faculty were not sufficiently learned and well-informed. Indeed my assessment of their directors is that their egos are in inverse proportion to their capabilities.

These misgivings were confirmed when I set about writing this month’s cover story to celebrate the imminent liberation of the country’s 11 IIMs from the suffocating embrace of the Union human resource development ministry and government. Despite EducationWorld having established itself as the country’s pre-eminent — if not sole — chronicler of education news and events, none of the ABC IIM directors — including the director of IIM-B who’s just a 15 minute drive away — could spare the time to discuss the plans and progress of these B-schools, promoted with thousands of crores of taxpayers’ money, with your sufficiently genuflecting editor.

Compared with the great majority of the country’s crowded, low-calibre colleges, universities and sundry institutions of higher education, the generously-funded IIMs with sprawling campuses, excellent architecture, advantageous teacher-pupil ratios and well-stocked libraries, are indeed verdant watersheds in the wilderness of Indian higher education. But the plain truth is that these publicly-funded B-schools admit barely 3,000 of the over 300,000 students who write their common entrance exam. And given the excellent enabling infrastructure of IIMs, the brightest and best students self-study and peer learn sufficiently to impress corporate recruitment teams. In short, the country’s much-vaunted IIMs are excellent institutions by rock-bottom Indian standards. In the annual surveys of the world’s best B-schools conducted by international agencies such as Times Higher Education, Financial Times, QS and Shanghai Jiao University, they hardly figure at all.

A valid excuse for the sub-optimal performance of the IIMs has been their lack of operational and financial autonomy. For half a century, populist politicians and generalist bureaucrats in New Delhi with little knowledge of academic norms and processes have cabined, cribbed and confined their managements. Therefore the imminent conferment of real autonomy on the IIMs following the reports and recommendations of three expert committees appointed by reformist Union HRD minister Kapil Sibal, merited investigation. The breadth, scope and likely outcomes of a new era for the country’s IIMs is discussed in our year-end cover story.

No less important are the issues discussed in our special report feature jointly written by assistant editor Summiya Yasmeen and Mumbai correspondent Swati Roy on the occasion of the 21st anniversary of the National Institute of Open Schooling. The success of this low-profile institute — the world’s largest secondary and higher secondary distance education school — is critical to India’s tardy socio-economic development effort in the 21st century. The authors of this first-ever in-depth report on NIOS tell you why.

Merry Xmas and Happy New Year!