Don’t Do This To The IIMs

Unfetter the IITs and IIMs, please: An open letter to the Prime Minister of India

Mananiya Pradhan Mantriji,

It is with some trepidation and fear that I write to you, seeking your intervention in this matter of the IIM Bill 2015. As an alumnus of IIT Delhi and IIM Ahmedabad, and as an academic with a PhD from a top-tier university in the US, who has been a student at, taught at, or visited some of the best academic institutions around the world for over three-and-a-half decades now, I can only admit that for the first time since the people of India gave you such a resounding vote of confidence, Pradhan Mantriji, I am truly worried and scared about the future of India.

I have just finished reading the Bill, as well as articles in the mass media today, along with the incisive letter by Mr A.M. Naik, the current chairman of the Board of Governors of my alma mater, IIM Ahmedabad, to the Minister HRD, and I fear, Pradhan Mantriji, that unless you intervene and ask the HRD Ministry mandarins to tear up the current Bill, we are all looking at a disaster in the making.

If a Bill is needed (and I do believe, as I explain below, higher education in India really needs to be radically reformed, restructured and revamped), this is anything but what higher education in India and the IIMs (and also the IITs) really need.

All you have to do, Pradhan Mantriji, is ask members of the IIT and/or IIM alumni community, what underpinned the successes they achieved in their careers and in life, and they will all say, unanimously, that it was the formative experience and unparalleled expertise they gained at the IITs and/or IIMs. Because we owe everything we have to these IITs and IIMs and because all of us care very deeply about their future, and about the future of India, we are understandably very agitated about what the Ministry of HRD wants to do to our alma maters.

And if you probe deeper to ask them what was it about the IITs and IIMs that made it possible for them to give us all the best possible start in life, they will all point to some outstanding faculty members (those of us who had the immense fortune to have learnt from the likes of Profs Nitin Patel, P.R. Shukla, Abhinandan Jain, and the late Prof L.R. Bhandari at IIM A, or who have seen the absolutely spellbinding mastery of the late Prof Ravi J. Mathai—who founded both IIM C and IIM A—in the classroom, to name just a few, know exactly what I am referring to). And, they will point to the academic freedom and autonomy those faculty members and we, the students, enjoyed at those IITs and/or IIMs. And to the initiative those faculty members took to launch some very innovative courses for us and for the other programme participants during our or their stints at the IITs and/or IIMs, so that all of us could, in turn, become just as innovative about the way we analyzed problems, arrived at alternative solutions, made our decisions, launched new products and services, and so on.

Those faculty members rewired our brains and our way of thinking completely, and to them we are and will always remain utterly beholden for all that we have achieved in life. And yet, how many times do you find the word “faculty” in the Bill? Four times!

How many times do you find the word “freedom,” “initiative,” or “autonomy” in the Bill? Zero!

How many times do you find the word “innovative,” or “innovation” in the Bill? Twice each!

In stark contrast, Pradhan Mantriji, do you know how many times you will find the word “rule” or “regulation” in the Bill? 15 and 39 times, respectively! In the latter case, that is one more than the number of times you would find the word “academic” – but then you would expect to find the word “academic” quite frequently in a bill intended for academic institutions, wouldn’t you?

Were those stints we spent in our formative years at the IITs and IIMs simply all about following “rules” or “regulations”? Au contraire, in fact. Our professors like Profs Patel, Shukla, Jain, and Bhandari, always taught us not to accept the status quo ante, to free our minds from the fetters of conventional thinking, and to break with traditions, in an iconoclastic sort of way. That is what makes the IITs and IIMs different and that is what makes their students and alumni different.

More to the point is the number of times you will come across the word “Central” (as in Central Government) or the word “Government” in the Bill: an astonishing 59 and 67 times respectively!

Do you see what is wrong with the bill, Pradhan Mantriji? It starts out by saying that it wants to “declare certain institutes of management as institutes of national importance with a view to empower these institutes to attain standards of global excellence in management, management research and allied areas of knowledge…,” but it ends up being all about “rules,” “regulations,” and “Government” (whether state or central).

And for good measure, how many times would you come across the word “alumni” or “entrepreneur” in the Bill? Once each! All you have to do is to visit Silicon Valley or any of the other hi-tech hot spots around the world. Throw a stone, and chances are you will hit an IIT or IIM alumnus. Sure, there are other very worthy academic institutions in India like the Manipal Institute of Technology (whose alumni, Satya Nadella and Rajan Suri, head Microsoft and Nokia, respectively), Jamnalal Bajaj in Bombay and FMS in Delhi, for instance. But the bulk of the CXO positions at some of the fastest growing and most promising firms anywhere around the world – occupied by Indians or people of Indian origin – are held by IIT and/or IIM alumni.

The bottom line, Pradhan Mantriji, is that the time has come to unfetter the IITs and IIMs completely! Just as our government apparatchiks and mandarins learnt the hard way that they knew very little about providing goods (fertilizers, scooters, watches, and so on) and services (remember the days when you had to wait for 14 years to get a landline connection or when you needed to get a sifarish from a minister to board an Air India flight to Trivandrum? – I do!), they will learn that they know just as little about other things that also really matter to the future of India, such as higher education and healthcare, for instance.

The problem, Pradhan Mantriji, is that India cannot afford the luxury of having these bureaucrats who have been itching, for instance, to get the IIMs under their control for many years now, learn about how little they really know about higher education, at the expense of the future that our children and all other Indians yearn for and now, with your able leadership, have come to expect!

So what alternative framework am I offering? A two- or three-tiered, two- or three-pronged structure for autonomous and truly independent institutes of technology and management (and medicine too, if you can take this logic further, with medicine being the third prong).

The two tiers refer to the Indian and National Institutes of Technology and Management (the two prongs). Instead of launching so many new IITs and IIMS, every year, when there are just not enough high-quality faculty members to staff the new programmes, I feel the government ought to focus on the second tier, i.e., the National Institutes, as the newer ones that it wants to launch and leave the IITs alone (alternately, the more established second tier institutions, private or otherwise, can be renamed as NITs, just as the Regional Engineering Colleges were upgraded and rebadged as NITs at Trichi, Suratkal, and so on, not so long ago).

These National Institutes, in turn, can expect to be upgraded as IITs, over time, once they have established a reputation for excellence and an alumni and resource network of consequence.

The third tier refers to a new layer that I am proposing, because I know the party apparatchiks and mandarins cannot really help meddling. It is in their genes! How about a bunch of Bharatiya Institutes of Technology and Management, at the bottom, that the party apparatchiks and mandarins can mess around with as much as they want? (Please believe me, Pradhan Mantriji, when I say that the “Bharatiya” bit has nothing to do with your party – it is just that the “Indian” and “National” names were already taken by the first and second tier institutes.) These would-be-meddlers can meddle as much they wish with the BITs and BIMs, as long as they leave the IITs, IIMs, NITs, and NIMs alone!

What about the autonomy and governance issues for these IITs, IIMs, NITs, and NIMs? What if we could have four national councils filled with eminent people – who will act on behalf of the people of India, who have a vested interest in making sure that high-quality academic institutes of national importance remain bastions of academic excellence, free from the whims and fancies of people who have no clue about what academics or excellence is really all about – to look after the general oversight of day-to-day operations of the respective sets of institutions and strategic directions that those institutions ought to take over time?

The new council structure could be designed to dovetail or segue seamlessly with the existing institution-specific society and board of governors structure, and they could feed into one another. That is, council members could serve terms on the boards for any of the IITs, IIMs, NITs, and NIMs, once they are done with their stints on the national councils, and vice versa. The directors of the respective institutes would be accountable to the boards (that would be set up by the national councils), the boards would be accountable to the national councils and the national councils would be accountable to the people of India (and only tangentially to the elected governments at the centre and the states).

How big would these national councils have to be? They could have, say, 36 members apiece, with 11 captains of industry, 11 high flying alumni and 11 academic representatives (from foreign as well as Indian academic institutions) serving simultaneously, say for one, or at the most two, four to five year terms, each, along with three government representatives (say, two from the Central Government and one from the government of the states where the institutions are located). The government representatives could ensure that the government’s voice is not being ignored, but they should not have veto rights over any of the council’s decisions.

These councils should be self-perpetuating, in the sense that when each of the 33 non-government council members is about to retire after serving one term (or two terms at the maximum), he or she could offer three names of potential replacements, from whom one could be picked by the council as a whole after the customary vetting and due diligence process, etc., as a replacement for the retiring member. The onus would be on the retiring member to ensure that his or her replacement is as good as, if not better than, him or her. Alternately, one could have junior and yet very promising future-members to serve simultaneously as understudies or mentees to the more senior and more accomplished members currently serving on the council, with the expectation that the understudies would replace the mentors when the latter retired from the council.

Needless to add, these councils could be designed to be self-policing and self-governing, to ensure that all of the councils’ decisions are always transparent and in the nation’s best interests and that there is nothing untoward happening at any of the councils or the institutions they were tasked with overseeing.

But how do we kick off the process of setting up the councils ab initio? India has been very fortunate in having some very eminent and highly respected, senior doyens of business and technology who have recently retired from active roles at the helm of their respective organizations, such as Mr Ratan Tata, Mr N.R. Narayan Murthy, Mr Nandan Nilekani, Mr K.V. Kamath, Mr Deepak Parekh, and so on. All of them are like our beloved former President Abdul Kalam, in that they would always put the nation before self. Why don’t we have President Abdul Kalam and such noted heavyweights as Mr Tata, and so on, take on the responsibility of making sure that the councils as initially set up, would have members just like them: selfless, brilliant and very capable?

The people of India would then not have to worry because they could rest assured that their IITs, IIMs, NITs, and NIMs are and will remain in safe hands, free from any petty interference and meddling by anyone, anywhere.

Thanks very much, Pradhan Mantriji, and my sincere apologies for inflicting such a long message to you – some things are too important to try and fit into 140 characters or whatever, if you know what I mean.

Yours sincerely,

An NRI professor (and an IIT and IIM alum) who cares very deeply about India’s future.

P.S. Just like all my fellow IIT and IIM alumni, I am eager to help out in any way I can to make those academic institutions better – I would be more than willing to make myself available for further consultations, to explain my proposal in a more lucid and better-illustrated manner, if needed.