The controversy that surrounds Ashoke Dutta, director of the youngest IIM, the Rajiv Gandhi Indian Institute of Management (RGIIM), Shillong, refuses to die.
It is now learnt that Dutta has declined an offer to join the Kolkata board of governors of the Indian Institute of Social Welfare and Business Management (IISWBM) as an All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) representative. His move follows protests from faculty members of IISWBM against his appointment.
“We understand that our ex-director Ashoke K Dutta has been appointed member of IISWBM's board of governors as the AICTE representative. As faculty members of IISWBM, we strongly object to the appointment. He had been director of the institute for 10 years during which he was responsible for gross irregularities in the institute,” reads a strongly-worded letter signed by several faculty members of the institute. When contacted, S N Ray, director of IISWBM, confirmed that Dutta is not joining the institute.
Dutta, however, told Business Standard: “I have declined to join IISWBM as a member of the board because I am a pensioner of the institute and it will be a conflict of interest. Also, I am a chairman of the board of management studies at AICTE and was nominated by it to be a member of IISWBM's board. Frankly speaking, people will complain if they want to. Everybody has an opinion. When good work is being done, there will be people objecting."
Dutta, who was the director of IISWBM till 2008, had been appointed as the AICTE representative by the body itself as a nominee this year. AICTE is the technical education regulatory body in the country. Now that Dutta is not joining IISWBM, Nitish Sengupta has been nominated as the new board member.
The development came to light through a letter to Chittatosh Mookerjea, president, board of governors, IISWBM, dated February 25, where faculty members protested against Dutta's appointment on the grounds that his working style was “not conducive to academic pursuits”.
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Existing faculty at IISWBM say they had problems with his functioning. Sources in the institute told Business Standard that Dutta was working as the director at both IISWBM, Kolkata and IIM Shillong simultaneously for at least six months.
This is not the first time that IISWBM faculty members have protested against their ex-director. In 2003, when Dutta was director, faculty members wrote a detailed letter to the board of governors on their concern with "his style of functioning" at the institute. After he left in 2008, P K Misra was elected acting director for the interim period. Finally, S N Ray, the current director took over from June 2009. Ray has been with IISWBM since 2001 and at the time of his elevation to the post of director, Ray was the head of the department of MBA programme at the institute.
IISWBM runs MBA programmes divided between day and evening classes, human resource management, public system management, all of which are certified by Calcutta University. Other courses include retail management and sports management. Total number of full-time faculty are 42 and students nearly 1,300.