A seemingly innocuous Indian Institutes of Management Bill 2015, which severely dilutes the autonomy of the IIMs, has ignited fears that an unfinished BJP/NDA agenda of 2004 to acquire control and command over India’s premier B-schools, has been revived – Dilip Thakore Beneath a deceptive everyday calm façade, there’s turmoil within the highly-reputed Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), the country’s premier business schools, the first of which — IIM-Calcutta — was promoted by the government of India in collaboration with the Ford Foundation and MIT Sloan School of Management in 1961. A few months later, IIM-Ahmedabad was promoted in collaboration with the Harvard Business School on the western periphery of the country. Since then in response to demand from state governments, the number of these institutions of excellence promoted by the Central government and established by special legislation enacted by Parliament have multiplied to 13 countrywide. The anxiety which pervades the sprawling campuses of the IIMs has been ignited by a seemingly innocuous Indian Institutes of Management Bill 2015, drafted by the Union ministry of human resources development (HRD) and uploaded on its website for public comment and discussion. Although the stated objects of the Bill are to designate them to be “institutions of national importance with a view (sic) to empower these institutions to attain standards of global excellence in management, management research and allied areas of knowledge” and to invest IIMs with degree awarding powers (hitherto under the IIM Acts they had been restricted to awarding postgraduate diplomas and fellowships), several provisions substantially expand the supervisory and regulatory powers of the Central government, i.e, the Union HRD ministry. Appointment of the board of governors, academic council, director, faculty and even syllabus and curriculum formulation are subject to government approval. Suddenly, there’s pervasive fear, not only within the academic councils and faculty but within all ‘stakeholders’ — alumni, industry and students — that the national and global reputation of these B-schools painstakingly developed over six decades, could be quickly destroyed by a bull-in-a-china-shop BJP-led NDA government. These fears are not unfounded. Since it was voted to power in May 2014, the BJP-dominated NDA in New Delhi which draws its ideological inspiration from the Hindu majoritarian cultural organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) whose leadership and intellectuals are hell-bent on establishing the historical and scientific validity of myths and legends of ancient India, has already played havoc in the Indian Council of Historical Research and the Film and Television Institute of India, not to speak of state-level organisations such as the Madhya Pradesh Professional Examinations Board (see editorial p.12). Nor is it a national secret that infiltrating hindutva propaganda into school textbooks is high on the agenda of the RSS and the motley bunch of affiliated organisations known as the sangh parivar (RSS family) which includes the BJP, its political arm. And it’s pertinent to note that the Bill which has been uploaded on the HRD ministry’s website for just over a month, could become law overnight. S.1 (2) of the…
