IIMC chief signs on Joshi dotted line

Just two days after the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, declined to cut its fees and said instead that it would talk to the HRD M...

Just two days after the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, declined to cut its fees and said instead that it would talk to the HRD Ministry and wait for the Supreme Court’s decision, IIM Kolkata chairman Yogi Deveshwar gave in to the Government.

Disregarding the faculty’s position paper on the subject which had said that the fee cut was part of a package to erode the institute’s autonomy, Deveshwar faxed a resolution accepting the fee cut to all board members today.

The resolution, drafted by Deveshwar, who is also ITC chairman, states: ‘‘…government order (for a fee cut) may be implemented in the belief that it is binding on the institute and that it is in the domain of the Ministry of Human Resource Development to frame policies related to subsidy in education…’’

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The faculty has called a press conference for Wednesday. ‘‘We are deeply anguished,’’ said Asish Bhattacharya, dean of planning and administration.

The West Bengal government, too, reacted angrily. In anticipation of what was coming, the government had instructed the top bureaucrat of its higher education department, Jawhar Sircar, to write to the HRD ministry, the chairman of the IIM-C Board and to the IIM-C director that any proposal for a fee cut or hike has to have the ‘‘prior approval’’ of both the Union and the state governments as per the provisons of the IIM rules and momorandum, 1961.

Besides, it argued that the matter was sub judice, since the Supreme Court is to hear a related case on April 8.

	What the Board Chairman over-ruled

			The IIM Calcutta faculty’s position paper on the fee cut clearly mentioned how it undermined the institute: • The Govt strategy will not guarantee growth; in fact it may not even guarantee survival. • Fee cut is tantamount to a regime of price control. • Anxiety from signals regarding abolition of CAT. • Lack of concern for consultative and transparent procedures of governance. • Will take Institute back to the decade of the seventies and eighties and the associated inefficiencies of deficit financing. Story continues below this ad

On March 26, after an angry four-hour meeting, the board had left it to Deveshwar to pass the resolution ‘‘reflecting the concerns of all the stakeholders.’’

For the IIM Kolkata faculty, however, Deveshwar’s stand flies in the face of its stand. It had argued that the fee cut would erode autonomy as it was ‘‘a package … (of) three restrictions (having) adverse consequences for revenue generation.’’

These were: a regime of price control, HRD’s advice that IIMs ‘‘dissave’’ their corpus and the Government’s move to put restrictions on donations.

Moreover, the faculty had expressed serious concerns over the signal from the Government to do away with the CAT entrance exam, group discussion and the interview.

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Those present in Kolkata were outraged—they said they had expected the chairman to allow a thorough discussion on the draft resolution before it was sent to the ministry. However, IIM officials said that the numbers may be on Deveshwar’s side as a majority of the board members, a lot of them being government nominees, are in favour of a fee cut.

In fact, in the days leading up to the March 26 board meeting, the HRD ministry had quietly nominated five handpicked persons to fill vacancies on the board.

One of them, the director of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, S K Dube, welcomed the resolution. ‘‘Though I have not seen the resolution, I am very happy at the fee cut proposal,’’ he said.