Fee cut likely to dent IIMs' balance sheets

Though the one-man Shunglu Committee report advocates the fee cut order issued by the Union human resources development ministry backing Murli Manohar Joshi, the bigger Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), mainly IIM-Ahmedabad and IIM-Bangalore, feel that implementation of the order will lead to huge deficit in its balance sheet and thus striking a compromise with the infrastructure development process.

The institutes also believe against the opinion of the panel that three big IIMs including IIM-Calcutta can run their shows even without charging any money from the students as the institutes' accounts clearly show that the average income generated from other courses, mainly Management Development Programmes , will not suffice to meet the ends of income and expenses.

"Though I am yet to receive a copy of the panel report and we have asked for a copy of the report for IIM-B, from media report it seems the panel has recommended that the bigger IIMs can continue without even charging a single penny from the PG students, I found it impossible task till the Government meets all the fund shortfall.

"Even if we have to ask only for the slashed amount of fees from the students, it will be difficult to meet the both ends till Government provides all the funds," Prakash Apte, director of IIM-Bangalore, told Business Standard.

IIM-A is setting up a new campus. The amount to be invested for this purpose will be Rs 50 crore. Of this, Rs 14 crore has already been spent.

The committee set up by the ministry had been trying to convey the message that with the large corpus amount lying with IIM-A, IIM-B and IIM-C, the income from interest on the corpus would help to take care of a lot of expenditures incurred by the Institutes, the corpus of IIM-A is now being used for developing infrastructure including a new campus.

IIM-B is working on the process of infrastructure development with a significant amount of budget and it also may finally forced to take money from the corpus for the development activities and thus, income in the form of interest from the corpus will keep declining.

IIM-A is setting up a new campus, few yards away from its existing campus in Vastrapur area of Ahmedabad and the total amount of money to be invested for this purpose will be Rs 50 crore in which already Rs 14 crore has been spent.