News18: New Delhi: Wednesday, September 20, 2017.
Denied
information about minutes of meetings of IIM-Ahmedabad, under the Right to
Information (RTI), two scholars are set to approach the Central Information
Commission. The RTI filed by Deepak Malghan, assistant professor Centre for
Public Policy, IIM-Bangalore and Siddhartha Joshi, doctoral fellow, sought
information on diversity deficit on campus and asked for the minutes of IIM-A’s
three most recent governing board meetings, which have the responsibility of
ensuring statutory compliance.
With RTI
replies from all IIMs, the duo have compiled a paper on ‘Missing Scholars:
Social Exclusion at the Indian Institutes of Management’ that shows how, for
the past four decades, the IIMs have been suffering from diversity deficit and
social exclusion.
This time
they filed an RTI to make sense of the decision making process at IIM-A and
asked for minutes of the last three meetings. In response to their latest
query, IIM-A claimed that “information sought has no relationship to any public
activity or interest and hence cannot be provided.”
When News18
sought comment from IIM-A director's office, in an e-mail they said, “In the
recent three board meetings there was no discussion on the diversity deficit at
IIMs.”
Malghan said
he will file a complaint with CIC, “I believe this is a deliberate ploy to
delay the process as much as possible. Their action betrays the implicit trust
reposed in them by society at large, especially as it comes at a time when the
Parliament was on the verge of granting them unprecedented autonomy through the
IIM Bill 2017.”
Malghan and
Joshi’s paper states that out of over 500 faculty members in IIMs, only two are
from scheduled caste, none from scheduled tribe and only 13 from other backward
castes (OBC). The report further states that “the doctoral programs at IIMs
must take a large part of the blame for this extant social diversity deficit.
For over four decades, the doctoral programs at the IIMs that also account for
about a third of all current faculty members at these institutions have
brazenly flouted affirmative action provisions for public institutions”.
“The reason
IIMs have been able to act with complete impunity is because they have the
implicit support of the government. We hope there is a serious debate on the
Bill in the Rajya Sabha and the social contract that is implicit at any public
institution is clearly spelled out,” Malghan said.
It is also
important to distinguish between “access and inclusion” as access is a
necessary condition for inclusion. “It is never a sufficient condition. IIMs,
even if they eventually come around to improving access, still have a long
journey ahead in terms of real inclusion, given the entrenched biases at play,”
added Malghan.
The two are
pinning their hopes on the IIM Bill to correct the decade’s long injustice done
to the SC/STs. The IIM Bill gives the institutes autonomy but has nothing
clearly written on the reservation policy in teacher recruitment. All it
vaguely mentions is “enabling provision allowing reservation in employment” for
which Malghan added, “The IIM Bill is an enabling framework and now we have to
design solutions to all sort of problems and dilemmas prevalent in higher
education.”
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