The Hindu Business Line : Quality can't be sacrificed for quantity: Rangarajan

Expert comment
Government and the non-profit sectors of the economy have also turned to the management graduates to meet their requirements.
Curriculum needs be improved in terms of content, methodology of teaching and creation of new knowledge through research.

Ahmedabad , Nov. 17

Noted economist Dr C. Rangarajan has cautioned business schools in India not to sacrifice quality at the altar of quantity but, at the same time, asked them to find more effective ways to identity the maximum number of brightest students among the masses to fuel the growth of economy and society.

He also called for "preferential treatment" to be given to experts in institutions like public sector undertakings such as banks to make them more competitive and professional, "without, of course, unsettling the existing structures."

Conference

Delivering the key-note address at the three-day conference on "New Directions in Asia Pacific Management Education" at the Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad (IIM-A), he emphasised on increasing the stock of knowledge by creating new funds of information, internationalisation of students, curricula, exchange of faculty and expanding the scope of management education through increased stress on analytical tools. The students should be given rigorous training to cultivate analytical skills and be given more time to let their acquired knowledge and skills sink in them and absorbed, he said.

The Second Annual Conference-2006 has been organised by the Association of Asia-Pacific Business Schools.

Finding Solutions

The purpose of management education is to make the student more efficient in identifying the areas of problems and opportunities and finding solutions, and create a pool of such talents for efficient management of institutions and the country's affairs, he said while applauding the role played by the IIMs in this regard.

Dr Rangarajan, former Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, and now Chairman of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, said more market does not mean less Government but a "different Government". While the Government in India is now vacating some areas, it is also entering some other areas, including primary health and education, in a big way, he said.

Saying that one of the reasons of the 1997 crisis in some East Asian countries was that they were more focused on inputs of resources rather than improving human efficiency, he asked management educators to look at "total factor of productivity" and efficiency of productive forces. He observed that many Indian companies, too, were now emerging as multi-national corporations in their own right and the management schools should factor in this as well in their curricula and discourage the "culture of conformism". In an increasingly integrating world and vanishing borders, it is no longer possible for any country to hold back ideas from others, he added. Dr Rangarajan pointed out that organisations have become large, technologies of production more complex and the environment very complicated, making the very idea of management evolutionary rather than a settled one. Apart from the business sector, even the Government and the non-profit sectors of the economy have turned to management graduates to meet their requirements, he said.

Economic Growth

Asian economies are at a point where fundamentally new growth dynamics are coming into play and it is no longer enough to produce goods and services more efficiently than the rest of the world, or generate economic growth by employing more labor and capital, he said. Economies must prepare themselves for the next stage of growth based on innovation and rising total factor productivity, which requires a change in the emphasis in management education, he added.

In this regard, he suggested enhanced coverage of topics like intellectual property rights, venture capital and entrepreneurship, incubators for new ventures, and courses on cross-cultural management and leadership. He also observed that curriculum should be improved in terms of content, methodology of teaching and creation of new knowledge through research.

"Management schools need to take the thought leadership role seriously. Much of the theorising about Asian economies happens in North America and Europe. Asian business schools need to play a bigger role thinking about what is happening in their own backyard and conceptualising emerging trends in this region," he said.

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