Dr. V. Raghunathan is a former professor of IIM-Ahmedabad, author and corporate executive

The steep fall in India’s annual rate of GDP growth from 8 percent-plus in 2007 to less than 5 percent this year, and almost total collapse of industrial growth has created a major problem for the estimated 400,000-500,000 business management graduates/MBAs streaming out of India’s 3,300 B-schools into the jobs market.

According to a study conducted by The Wall Street Journal (December 2012) based on an “employability test” administered to 32,000 graduates of 220 Indian B-schools, only 10 percent were found to be employable. Given that most of the graduates found to be employable must be of the country’s 13 Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) and a handful of other highly-rated business schools, the great majority of India’s B-schools are delivering little value to the huge number of graduate students who sign up with them. Undoubtedly, our globally famous IIMs have delivered significant value to the nation over the decades. In a nation of mediocrity, these little islands of excellence, with outstanding students, committed faculty, and sound administration has played a significant role in delivering high-quality business management education, even if they aren’t ranked among the top 100 B-schools worldwide.

Most of these institutions cost the exchequer dearly. At a conservative estimate, each new IIM at current prices requires an investment of Rs.300 crore (excluding the value of land). And until five years ago, the three older IIMs, for instance, were graduating a mere 200-250 students annually, which after much huffing and puffing, the Union HRD ministry managed to push to about 400. Clearly, for a resource-constrained nation, these are huge investments in a few institutions which benefit only a handful of students in a country of 1.3 billion, 50 percent of whom are below 25 years of age. Therefore given the quantum of scarce capital being consumed by them, additional responsibility should be imposed upon state-sponsored and supported IIMs.

A few months ago, while engaged in a formal meeting with the chairman of a leading IIM, I suggested that IIMs should take MOOCs (massive online open courseware)  which MIT, Boston has pioneered, to the next level, by offering massive online open classware (MOOCL). This would entail the IIMs beaming the classroom proceedings of every course being offered, online to reach potentially 2,000 Reliance-Webworld-like centres countrywide accessible to hundreds of thousands of students. Tier II B-schools could also subscribe to these online study programmes with coordinators trained by IIMs in separate programmes.

IIM-Online could provide the certification for such courses. The incremental cost of beaming live classroom lectures would be minuscule (relative to the tuition fees IIMs charge), and could be more than covered by charging a nominal fee to students registering for IIM-Online certification. Students could choose courses of their interest, leading to, say a finance diploma, marketing or general management diplomas from a IIM-Online menu. I argued that unless India’s top-ranked B-schools take the lead, they may be overtaken by the likes of Harvard or MIT, if they start offering their classroom programmes online.

To my surprise, the IIM board members were reluctant to offer MOOCLs on the ground that it would dilute the brand equity of the IIMs. This, when the motto of IIM-Ahmedabad is vidhya viniyogadwikasahä — ‘Knowledge grows the more you spread it’. This proposal involves no change in current pedagogy, content or methods of delivery of the IIMs’ current programmes. All that’s required is to beam their classes to the world beyond their campuses. Employers are intelligent enough to be able to distinguish between the fully residential 24-month IIM postgraduate diploma certificate from online programmes of IIM-Online. But unfortunately, my proposal and arguments in favour thereof didn’t cut much ice.

We live in an interconnected world, in which the validity of vidhya viniyogadwikasahä is truer than ever before. Open-source software, open courseware and open ideas are becoming ubiquitous. According to Matt Ridley, author of the Rational Optimist (2010), “the open-source software industry, with products like Linus and Apache, is booming on the back of a massive wave of selflessness — programmers who share their improvements with each other freely”. Open-source systems like cloud computing are beginning to take the same path. MIT, Boston has put all its course content online free of charge; Coursera.com offers hundreds of high-end online study programmes taught by the best faculty of top-ranked universities worldwide, free of charge.

It is in this context that open-classware streaming from IIMs is an idea whose time has come. It’s sad but true that notwithstanding the good work done by the IIMs in the past, today they are way behind the applied information technology curve. Even in terms of usage of modern tools of administration, evaluation, HR systems and contemporary information technology, industry seems to be way ahead of the IIMs. It’s high time the IIMs enlarge their bank of goodwill to deliver quality management education to the wider community of students. They owe it to the country, and themselves.

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