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AN UNPRECEDENTED CHANGE IN THE process of selecting the next director of the prestigious Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow (IIM-L, estb.1984), reportedly ordered by Union HRD minister Smriti Irani, has generated considerable heartburn within the faculties of the country’s 13 Central government-promoted Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), especially the first six IIMs (Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Lucknow, Kozhikode, and Indore) which have acquired a global reputation for graduating highly employable business management graduates.
Following completion of the five-year term of Dr. Devi Singh as director on September 9, 2014, Irani reportedly decreed a change in the process of selecting his successor. Hitherto, the board of governors of each IIM constituted a search committee which invited applications for this apex-level position, short-listed eligible candidates, interviewed them and recommended a panel of two-three names to the ministry which forwarded them to the President, the ex-officio visitor of all IIMs.
However in group discussions ordered by Irani, all applicants discuss a chosen subject or issue — a mandatory requirement of student applicants short-listed for IIM pre-admission interviews. During the group discussion, members of the search committee are silent observers. Seventeen eminent educationists short-listed for the position of director of IIM-L reported for group discussion before the panel.
This change in the selection process has aroused great indignation — as also apprehension — within the IIM-L faculty, with even the usually media friendly public relations cell refusing to comment and a professor of communication declaring he is “too small a fry” to opine on the issue. However, Dr. Pritam Singh, former director of IIM-L (1998-2003) who played a major role in developing the institute sited in under-governed Lucknow into a globally respected B-school, has no such inhibitions. “The director’s position at IIMs is equivalent to the post of senior-most officials of the Central government. Subjecting candidates applying for it to group discussions is a public insult to them,” he says.
Adds K.R.S. Murthy, former director (1991-97) of the top-ranked IIM-Bangalore: “This is a sharp departure from past practice and has reduced the process of selecting IIM directors with long academic track records to the level of assessing student applicants.”
A higher secondary dropout and former television soaps star albeit an articulate (English and Hindi) spokesperson of the BJP, since her surprise appointment as HRD minister Irani has ruffled feathers not only in the IIMs but also in the country’s globally admired 16 Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). In March, eminent nuclear scientist Dr. Anil Kakodkar resigned as chairman of the board of governors of IIT-Bombay following differences with Irani over the appointment of directors of three new IITs. Earlier in December 2014, IIT-Delhi director Dr. R.K. Shevgaokar put in his papers reportedly in protest against the HRD ministry’s pressure on the institute to pay back the wages of BJP’s maverick ideologue Dr. Subramaniam Swamy, who claims he was unfairly dismissed for political reasons from the faculty of the institute way back in the 1970s, and also reportedly, for refusal to establish a Sachin Tendulkar cricket academy within IIT-D.
Clearly, hard times are upon the IIMs and IITs, post-independence India’s few globally respected institutions of higher education.
Puja Awasthi (Lucknow)