Dr Raveendra Chittoor, the dean of Jio Institute, has resigned from his post less than a year after he was appointed, marking the second high-profile exit from the Reliance-backed institute this year. Chittoor has served as a professor of strategy and international business at the Gustavson School of Business, University of Victoria, Canada. He has also taught at the Indian School of Business and the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta and worked with IBM, CRISIL, and the Rajan Raheja group. His resignation comes less than four months after Dr G Ravichandran, one of the institute’s most prominent hires, resigned as Provost well before the end of his term in March. Ravichandran, who had served as the Otis Booth Leadership Chair of the Division of Engineering and Applied Science at California Institute of Technology from 2015 to 2021, had joined as Jio Institute’s founding Provost in July 2022. The two exits have come at a time when Jio Institute continues to wait for its formal recognition by the Union government as an ‘Institution of Eminence (IOE)’, with no clear path or plan for its future without the IOE tag. This leaves two key positions held by academics vacant. Chittoor and Palak Sheth, Project Director at Jio Institute, did not respond to The Indian Express’s requests for comment. Jio Institute had announced Chittoor’s appointment as dean and professor of management in a release dated October 30, 2023. “Dr Chittoor brings with him nearly three decades of distinguished academic and industry expertise, making him a valuable addition to the Jio Institute team,” the release had said. The release quoted Dr Dipak Jain, Vice Chancellor of Jio Institute, as saying: “I am delighted to welcome our new Dean, Dr. Ravee Chittoor, to the Jio Institute family. He brings with him a wealth of experience from both the Eastern and Western worlds, which will be invaluable as we continue to build a world-class institution that harmonizes the best educational philosophies from both cultures. I look forward to working with him to create leaders who are equipped to meet the challenges of the 21st century, and to build a better sustainable future for all.” In 2018, Reliance's Jio Institute was selected by a government-appointed expert panel for the status of ‘Institution of Eminence’, a scheme which would give it greater administrative and academic autonomy. However, more than five years later, it still awaits this tag and Jio Institute today is little more than an All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE)-affiliated campus — one of nearly 5,000 offering only certificate and diploma courses. In 2022-23, it admitted its first batch of 120 students in two programmes, artificial intelligence and data science, and digital media and marketing communications. In 2023-24, it admitted a smaller number of around 60 students. A far cry from the Institution of Eminence it was envisaged as. An investigation by The Indian Express last year had shown that at least four private institutions continue to wait for formal recognition as IOEs despite being selected under the Centre’s ambitious scheme backed by the Prime Minister’s Office, which would give them sweeping autonomy in administration and academics and help them upgrade to global standards. Jio Institute, Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology (KIIT), Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT), and Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham are the four private institutions whose readiness reports were approved by the Union government’s empowered committee by July 2020. Nearly four years later, all four are waiting for the final Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) to be signed. While KIIT, VIT, and Amrita continue their operations, Jio Institute, being a greenfield venture that did not even have a campus in place at the time of its selection in 2018, has not seen much growth in the absence of the IOE tag. In fact, the decision to select Jio for the IOE status set off a political firestorm in 2018, with the Opposition accusing the NDA government of crony capitalism. At the heart of the delays affecting the IOE scheme is a defunct empowered expert committee (EEC), which was first created to cut red tape and make University Grants Commission regulations more flexible for the 20 selected institutions. However, the EEC has been inactive for the past two years because the last committee led by former chief election commissioner N Gopalaswami, completed its three-year term on February 20, 2021. Since then, the government has not appointed new members or extended the term of the Gopalaswami panel.
