In less than 9 months for the diploma course, year after year, IIMC became like a run-of-the-mill polytechnic. It would reproduce robot-like half-trained products, intellectually half-baked creatures, with no holistic academic or professional skills. It was India’s first and premier institute under the public sector in journalism, like FTII in cinema, and this was easy enough to turn it into a sort of ‘placement agency’. Even the best of students, or potentially brilliant journalists with fire in their belly, would fall into the trap. In a slow growth, jobless market economy, with limited media outlets, especially in print journalism, what options do students have?
Hence, the fall and fall of IIMC continued; only that year after year, talented and idealistic students from far-flung areas in the country, including in other centres of IIMC like Dhenkanal in Odisha, injected life and energy into the campus in their short stint, breaking the barriers of both bureaucracy and sarkari stranglehold. It is the students, with the help of just a handful of teachers, who tried to fly on the wings of freedom and genius, reaffirmed the non-conformity of journalism, engaged with society, history and politics, and sought the academic freedom to question and seek difficult answers. Without the students, IIMC seems like a ghost story, like all its ghost corridors after all the babus leave for home.
The Congress cared two hoots; they let the bureaucrats control it. Under the current dispensation, with its obsession to impose its one-dimensional and retrograde ideology, it is no more the case. The current Director General (DG), KG Suresh, a former PTI journalist with no great credentials in the profession, has been hand-picked because he was cog in the wheel of the RSS think-tank, Vivekananda Foundation.