For recommending names for Director and Chairman posts: Barua

The Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, has demanded restoration of the powers of the board of directors in recommending a list of names for the final selection by the Centre for the posts of the IIMA Director and the Chairman of the board.

Talking to journalists here on Thursday, IIMA Director Samir Barua said the institute was still awaiting the Centre's nod to the Memorandum of Agreement suggesting the changes sent to the Union Human Resource Development Ministry for approval. He said the Gujarat government had already given its approval “in toto” to the memorandum.

He said the IIMA in the memorandum suggested that the board should have the powers to recommend three each for the appointment of the Chairman of the board of governors and the IIMA Director from which the Central government would have the option to pick one. He said this was the practice followed in the past but lately the Centre had assumed all the powers to appoint a committee to recommend any name for selection by the government for the posts.

Mr. Barua disagreed that the IIMA was piqued by the alleged “governmental interference” for which it had recommended the changes. “It is the question of accountability,” he claimed and said the person responsible for delivering the goods should be accountable to the board and that would be possible only when the board had a say in his or her appointment.

He said he was not aware what process other IIMs suggested for the appointment of chairmen and directors because each IIM had separate memoranda of agreement. The IIMA had also recommended downsizing the board of governors from the present 25 to 15 for “better performance” including four nominated members, two each by the Central and the State governments.

Refuting the allegations made by Union Minister Jairam Ramesh and the Infosys founder-chairman about “deteriorating standards” of the IIMs and the IITs in the country, Mr. Barua said the criticism was directed more at the IITs and the “IIMs just happened to be tagged along.” The slideback in respect of research and publications was the main reason for Mr. Ramesh's adverse remarks about the institutions, he said.

Mr. Barua said he was “reasonably happy” because the IIMA alone published an average of 50 to 60 research papers per year as against the Union Minister's claim of just about “15-16 papers by all the IIMs together.”

He decried the move by the IIM, Indore, to launch bachelor's degree in management. He said he was of the firm view that the IIMs should continue to offer only post-graduate courses because it was not possible for the students coming out fresh from the schools to get training in advanced management. He pointed out that courses like the Bachelor in Business Administration was in vogue in the country for a number of years now but had not proved to be very attractive.

About the current year's batch size of the IIMA flagship course, the Post-Graduate Programme in Management” (PDP), Mr. Barua said 352 of the 372 students, about 95 per cent, admitted for the course in the coming year come with engineering background, with only nine having commerce background, 10 science and one in agriculture. He said 270 students held average work experience of 25 months while the remaining 102 had no work experience. Of the total number of students, 41 were females and the reservation category wise was 103 from the other backward classes, 48 scheduled castes, 20 scheduled tribes and nine “differently abled.”

Even in the Post-Graduate Programme for Executives (PGPX), as many as 82 students in the batch size of 101 were engineers, he said. The students for the course were selected from 908 applications; 244 were called for interview. Several new electives including “courses in advanced valuation,” “key account management,” “fundamentals of insurance” and “cross border mergers and acquisition and integration” would be offered to the PGPX students in the current academic year.