IIM Bill Brings Discomfort To Other B-Schools

There is a great urgency to come out of pre-economic reform era mindset and set higher standards in professional education.

- Ramesh Kumar Raja

The Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Bill, which seeks to provide powers to grant degrees to 20 prestigious business institutes, was introduced in the Lok Sabha by Union HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar recently. As per the bill, IIMs would be declared “institutions of national importance”.

The government has been advocating more autonomy to the institutes which excel in their fields and in line with this policy, the IIM Bill, 2017 proposes that the board of governors will be the principal executive body of each IIM.

The IIMs till now had been registered as societies and unable to grant degrees, including PhD, to their students. In the ‘statement of objects and reasons’, Javadekar said that while Post Graduate Diploma in Management Programme (equivalent to MBA) was relatively unaffected, the Fellow Programme in Management (equivalent to PhD), without the formal degree nomenclature, has not been able to attract enough students required to develop a strong research base in the country.

Why did it take two years for the Bill to be approved by the Cabinet?

When the draft Bill was first made public in June 2015, when Smriti Irani was the HRD minister, the IIMs objected to the ‘excessive government control’. The IIMs, especially IIM-Ahmedabad, had attacked two clauses of the draft Bill, saying it “reduced the institutes to government departments”.

Under the two clauses [3(k) and 36(1)], the IIMs would have had to seek the government’s approval for every decision, including fee structure, admission criteria, formation of academic departments, salary of the staff and constitution of BoG. These powers are currently held by the IIM BoGs.