If, for Stephen Rodger Waugh, winning a Test series in India was "the final frontier", for HRD minister Dr Murli Manohar Joshi, it must be gaining total control of the two world-class educational systems we have in the country, the IITs and the IIMs. History has been conquered, school syllabi have been vanquished, now only the best of Indian higher education remains to be quelled.
If he hasn't succeeded fully yet, it certainly hasn't been for lack of trying.
| | | | Joshi wants the IIMs to be dependent on the government, so that he can do whatever he wants with them. | | | | |
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For the first time in history, ministry bureaucrats sit on IIT boards. Dr Joshi has been trying to fiddle with the IIT entrance examinations. There's talk of setting up a dozen—or even more—new IITs, of renaming existing engineering institutes as IITs. The ministry has managed to establish tighter control over the IITs' finances, and is trying the same with the IIMs.
The leakage of the test papers of the Common Admission Test (CAT) for the IIMs has now given Dr Joshi the perfect excuse to ram through his regressive and dangerous ideas. The CAT, one of the toughest and fairest tests in the world, will now be abolished, and a committee has been set up to devise a new test which will be common to all management schools in India. Significantly, the committee does not include the directors of the three best IIMs, who have been boldly resisting Dr Joshi's moves.
The official reason for this is that the B-school aspirant will now sit for only one test and then pick his institute based on the marks he obtains. But the real effect will be that, with the government conducting the tests, the IIMs will lose control over who to admit. Can you imagine a school where all the students are
given to it, by some external authority? That's what Dr Joshi wants the IIMs to be.
Just one question for Mr V.S. Pandey, joint secretary in the HRD ministry, who signed the CAT-scrapping letter to the IIMs: Mr Pandey, would you, as an ias officer, agree to the 12 civil services exams conducted by the UPSC and all the state civil services exams being reduced to one common test? Why, Mr Pandey, does this sound like a rhetorical question to me?
Dr Joshi has asked the IIMs to keep just Rs 25 crore in their corpus and give the rest to the government. His primary goal in this, one senses, is not to improve management education in the country with this money, but to make the IIMs financially dependent on the government, so he can do whatever he wants with them—tamper with the syllabus, with appointments, with admissions, who knows what.
Anyone halfway familiar with the IITs and IIMs knows that they are so good precisely because they have been fairly autonomous. The government's own committees and advisors have, in fact, always pushed for
more autonomy, not less. In 1986, the IIT Review Committee urged less interference from the government, and specifically said that "it would be unwise to bring IITs under the UGC system and
attempt uniformity", precisely what Dr Joshi is aiming to do. In other words, Dr Joshi wants to bring the IITs and IIMs down to the level of other institutes.
In 2000, the Prime Minister asked Mckinsey to examine ways to improve the IITs. The consultancy firm strongly recommended more autonomy, especially given the fact that China had embarked on a spectacularly ambitious project to have 100 IIT-quality engineering schools within 20 years. The report was submitted to the PM—and Dr Joshi—in December 2000. The results are there for all to see.
Over the last one year, Dr Joshi has alienated many of the most successful IIT alumni. Even after the President and the Prime Minister had agreed to grace the biggest IIT alumni event ever, scheduled for December 21 in Delhi, the HRD ministry's intransigence forced the organisers to cancel the meet. Many alumni are keen to repay their alma mater for all they received from it.But who would give money if you have no control over where it's going? By banning IITs from receiving money directly from their alumni, who can only donate now to the newly-set-up Bharat Shiksha Kosh (which will decide where to spend the money and on what), he's ensured that the donations stop.
But that's OK by Dr Joshi, since he wants to keep the IITs and IIMs impoverished. He wants all the excess cash the IIMs have, plus he wants them to reduce their fees dramatically. There's some mumbo-jumbo being trotted out about the IIMs having "the potential to contribute more to the country's education programme by becoming more accessible". But banks are falling over one another to give educational loans to IIM students, it's the safest investment you can make! And, if the fees are reduced by 90 per cent, will IIM graduates suddenly start joining the social sector instead of multinationals? Indeed, it makes no sense for the government to subsidise the IIMs at all! For, in effect, the beneficiaries of the subsidies are the Goldman Sachs and Citibanks of the world! But that's OK by Dr Joshi, because he will be able to teach the IIM students what he wants them to learn (he has asked the IIMs to inform—that is, seek approval from—the ministry before they start any new programme).
I visited IIT Kharagpur recently. Many of my old professors seemed utterly demotivated. One told me: "If things continue like this, in 20 years' time, the IITs will have no brand equity in the world at all." If this happens, we will know who was responsible.
But then, Waugh never crossed "the final frontier". Maybe there's a V.V.S. Laxman, a Rahul Dravid, a Harbhajan Singh lurking in our governance system somewhere. Unlikely, but we can't let that hope fade totally, can we?
(The author is an IIT-IIM alumnus. His book, The IITians, will be published by Penguin/Viking in January 2004.)