The Hindu Business Line : Management education

THE fee-slash move by the Human Resource Development Minister, Mr Murli Manohar Joshi, has raised a number of issues. One is, does the Government have the money to fundmanagement education in the country? Assuming the Government wishes to promote management education in an equitable manner, it would need an additional Rs 25,000 crore to fund nearly 100,000 MBAs each year in about 1,000 B-Schools. It is difficult to comprehend this amount of budgetary support, in the light of the reduction outlay approved in the Interim Budget. Any government would find it difficult to raise resources of this magnitude to fund management education.

The Ministry has taken this decision, in spite of the reservations expressed by the IIMs and their Chairmen.In the recent weeks, management educationists have brought to the fore other priorities which the HRD Ministry must address: Shortage of qualified teachers in management, the urgency to promote research, to establish an all-India admission testing system and the need for management education to be self-financing. Mr J. J. Irani, former Chairman, Tata Steel, has argued that autonomy of professional institutions such as IIMs should not be tampered with; Mr T. Thomas, former Chairman, Hindustan Lever, has recommended that the IIMs should refuse central assistance; Mr S. L. Rao, former Director, ICAER, wrote that the government must stop interfering in matters such as fees, instead it must look at substantive issues such as maintaining the standards of management education. Mr Samuel Paul, former director, IIM(A), has suggested that the best schools must manage themselves. He has argued that the Ministry should monitor and assess the health of management education system as a whole and create a supportive environment for those institutions to function properly.

Why should the government want to manage business schools? Institutions of excellence thrive on autonomy, innovation and empowerment. Worldwide, they are self-driven and self-governed, pursuing growth on their own terms. The IIMs need to be left alone. It is time the Government took a holistic view of management education in the country; ad hoc tinkering will not do good to any system, however strong it may be.

Some have argued that the HRD Ministry is fully aware of all those; others believe that the HRD Minister is trying to spread the "feed good" among the millions of middle-class citizens who aspire to send their children to the IIMs. While populism may be a good strategy from the political point of view, it is certainly not in national interest. The IIMs are centres of excellence; tampering with them can have undesirable consequence. If the Ministry's strategy is to induce other business schools to scale down their fees as well, this may not be the route. The private schools and the university-affiliated institutions will seek subsidy which can run into thousands of crore of rupees, which no government, however populist, would be able to afford. It is not too late for the Government to find ways of funding the education of the deserving poor without subsidising the rich.

Indian management education is at the crossroads; it can register sustained growth only by focussing on such areas as development of competent faculty, promotion of basic and applied research, encouraging B-schools to meet sectoral demands, making corporates fund and strengthen management education, and encouraging B-Schools to excel globally. All this requires a holistic approach. The Government should not meddle in areas where it is short on expertise. It may be prudent to establish an All-India Management Council with the sole purpose of enhancing the quality of management education. The All-India Council of Technical Education, which also looks after management education, may not be able to do full justice to the discipline. Management is a multi-faculty discipline; AICTE treats it as a single subject, spending only 4 per cent of its revenue on management education. One cannot blame the AICTE, which sees technical education, not management, as its core.

In less than 50 years, `management' has emerged as a vibrant area of professional education. Half a million candidates compete annually for the 1,00,000 seats. With demand for management education on the rise, its qualitative growth needs serious attention. This should be the real agenda for the HRD Ministry. Establishing an All-India Management Council, which can take a comprehensive view on the development of management education, should be the HRD Ministry's target. It would be best to put on hold the ad hoc decisions made so far.

(The author, a former Professor at IIM Calcutta, is Chairman, COSMODE.)

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