The Wire: Ahmedabad: Friday, September 15, 2017.
IIM Ahmedabad
responded to an RTI request asking for minutes of board meetings saying that
“[i]information sought by [us] has no relationship to any public activity or
interest and hence cannot be provided.”
The Indian
Institutes of Management (IIMs), the preeminent management institutes in the
country, are at the cusp of being granted a level of functional autonomy that
is unprecedented for public institutions of higher education in India. The Lok
Sabha has already passed the IIM Bill, 2017, and it is widely expected that the
Rajya Sabha will follow suit. Will Indian society at large be able to hold IIMs
accountable once the new IIM Bill becomes a law? The recent track record at these
institutions and especially at IIM Ahmedabad (IIMA), the crown jewel among
IIMs, suggests that IIMs, emboldened by the autonomy on offer, will further
abdicate their responsibilities as public institutions.
As has been
widely reported in various news outlets including The Wire, IIMs suffer from a
grave social diversity deficit – of the 512 IIM faculty members where data is
available, only two belong to the SC group, and IIMs currently do not have
anybody from the ST group on their faculty.
Further, with only 13 OBC representations among the remaining 510
faculty members, IIMs are an exclusive preserve of faculty members drawn from
the upper echelons of India’s hierarchical society. Beyond the broader
structural factors that contribute to this utter lack of social diversity,
decades skirting constitutional mandates in running their doctoral programmes
is responsible for this situation that we have termed the “missing scholars”.
Despite global pressure from IIM alumni asking the IIMs to take immediate corrective
measures to reverse many years of wilful neglect, IIMA has taken the lead in
not making the recommended changes. In their recently released guidelines
governing doctoral admissions for 2018, IIMA has continued with its entrenched
practice of ignoring questions of social diversity and inclusion.
In order to
better understand the decision making process at IIMA, we had filed RTI (Right
to Information) application with the institute asking for the minutes of their
three most recent governing board meetings. The governing board has direct
fiduciary responsibility for ensuring statutory compliance. IIMA has been
stonewalling our multiple RTI requests on questions of diversity and inclusion
over the last several months. However,
their response to our latest request for minutes of their board meetings was
shocking even by their own standards. Their response (reproduced in full below,
except for Joshi’s home address that has been masked) essentially amounted to a
formal secession as a public institution – IIMA claimed that “[i]information
sought by [us] has no relationship to any public activity or interest and hence
cannot be provided.”
The absence
of conviction in IIMA’s intransigence only betrays a lack of moral imagination
around questions of diversity and inclusion. The wilful contravention of
constitutional provisions is patently indefensible and the purveyors of a
specious notion of meritocracy at IIMA have instead resorted to deceit and
skullduggery. In the face of this intellectual defeat, IIMs lead by IIMA have
consistently used a largely self-serving notion of academic autonomy as a fig
leaf to cover up for the moral vacuity of their arguments for continued social
exclusion.
The three
largest and oldest IIMs at Ahmedabad, Bengaluru and Kolkata have long made the
fallacious argument that financial independence from public funding absolves
them from the implicit social contract underlying a public institution. IIMs
have largely reduced autonomy to their ability to pay their faculty members
several multiples of what the professoriate at other Indian public institutions
are paid. Beyond their stand on diversity and inclusion, IIMA’s latest act in
opacity is also driven by the fact that we have been (thus far unsuccessfully)
asking IIMA to make the salaries of its professoriate, or the so-called thought
leaders, public. While the best public universities around the world disclose
individual faculty salaries, we have only asked for anonymised data that does
not identify individual faculty members. Astronomically high salaries for IIM
faculty members, like the neglect of social diversity and inclusion, is linked
to a wholesale rejection of a public university’s true mission. IIMs are able
to substantially “top off” their regular salaries only by reducing the students
at these institutions into customers, and the professoriate into customer
service providers. Customers on campus represent an obituary for youthful
idealism that is associated with students that they displace.
Successive
governments have been complicit in facilitating IIMs’ retreat from their social
compact. Indeed, egged on by a consumptive urban middle class, the state has
aided and abetted duplicity and opacity at these institutes – especially on the
knotty questions of social diversity and inclusion. In the most recent episode,
the secretary at the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), K.K.
Sharma, had written to all IIMs on April 19 asking them to take corrective
actions to address their acute social diversity deficit. The letter was
strongly worded and contained prescriptive suggestions for reversing long-term
neglect of diversity and inclusion in the doctoral programmes at IIMs. The
letter notes that that “there has been no appreciable progress in getting more
numbers as Faculty from SC/ST/OBC categories,” and chides them for making “no
concerted efforts in trying to set right this aberration.” As a first
ameliorative step, the letter suggested “having more Fellows from SC/ST/OBC
categories so that they can become prospective faculty members in your
institute.”
Sharma, the
author this letter, sits on the governing boards of several IIMs including
IIMA. Most IIMs have chosen to ignore this letter and IIMA even claimed (in an
RTI response) that they never received the letter even after we made a copy
obtained from MHRD available to them. The governing board of IIMA would have
been the forum where the policy measures suggested by Sharma should have been
discussed. Given that IIMA believes that the minutes of its board meetings are
not of public interest, we do not know if he attended board meetings held after
his own letter was mailed and if the diversity deficit at IIMA was discussed in
these meetings. Were the governing board members aware that they were signing
off – yet again – on the violation of statutory provisions governing doctoral
admissions at public institutions? We don’t know, because the IIMA has ruled
that such information has “has no relationship to any public activity or
interest and hence cannot be provided.”
The moral
case for diversity and inclusion is intimately tied to the idea of a public
university. In light of the above evidence which hints at the likelihood that
IIMs may treat autonomy as impunity from any public scrutiny, it is imperative
that the Rajya Sabha must include suitable amendments to the IIM Bill passed by
the Lok Sabha to ensure that IIMs (and in particular, the leader of the pack,
IIMA) recognise their mission as public institutions. Universities are not, and
should not be, construed as an organ of the state unfortunately, the fate of
many public institutions in India. The IIM Bill offers IIMs unprecedented
autonomy to craft their own destinies. However, autonomy at any public
university ought to be marshalled to fulfil its public mission. As important
norm makers in contemporary India, the trajectory of IIMs following the passage
of the IIM Bill will have reverberations beyond these institutions. Indeed, no
less than the future of the public university is at stake.
Siddharth
Joshi is a fellow at IIM Bangalore and Deepak Malghan is on the faculty at IIM
Bangalore. Views are personal.
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