IIMs shining

The human resource ministry's diktat to the six premier institutes of management, asking them to slash student fees by 80 per cent, is bogus egalitarianism built on the basis of a lie.

It achieves nothing, but it will begin the emasculation of centres of excellence. It diverts money from more urgent educational needs, and channels them into pockets that would soon be full of cash anyway, without help from government largesse.

And it sends a clear signal, that no matter how liberalised our economic system might become, the government simply will not tolerate autonomy in educational establishments.

Justification for this indefensible decision is offered in the form of the U R Rao committee report.

But Prof Rao has clarified that his committee did not go into IIMs at all, it only looked at the other management institutes covered by the All India Council of Technical Education; and a member of the Rao committee has stated publicly that the report is being quoted out of context when the government picks out the fee numbers that it is now dictating into official policy.

So the Rao committee has nothing to do with what the government has ordered, and to cite the committee as authority is to perpetrate a falsehood.

The IIMs, of course, have had no say in the matter. Their normal fee-determining process has been by-passed, and the views of institute directors, faculty and students ignored.

It is not that the institutes are over-charging students, because fees cover only half the costs. It is not that the students are complaining about the fees being too high.

Even those students who cannot afford to pay the fees have said, when their opinion has been sought, that they have no difficulty in getting bank loans; and repaying the loans is no problem because of the salaries they earn as soon as they get their diplomas.

Besides, why pick on the six IIMs and force them to charge only Rs 30,000 when 900 other management institutes, with lesser standing, continue to charge lakhs of rupees?

If the intention was to help poor students, the government could have used the same money to offer a national management scholarship programme to any needy student admitted to a recognised management institute, along the lines of the national science talent scholarship.

Such a scholarship programme would not of course sub-serve the real reason for the government's extraordinary conduct, which is the old game of taking control and snuffing out autonomy.

Once the IIM directors have to run to Delhi to get money to pay salaries, they have to kow-tow to every babu and minister who comes along and has a whim. And who is to say that the whims will be confined to policy matters?

Today it is insistence on a common admission test; tomorrow it could be introducing the Hindutva ideology into management curricula; the day after, it could be favoured admission for a minister's nephew, as has happened in medical colleges where the government has a say. In short, there is absolutely nothing to redeem this utterly retrograde decision.