Balm after stitch: Arjun sends Mr Fix-it to IIMs

Now that relations between the Centre and the IIMs are more or less patched up, HRD Minister Arjun Singh wants to keep it that way. And his pointman, new HRD Additional Secretary Sudeep K. Banerjee, who will over the next week visit all IIMs and attend their board meetings as the ministry’s representative.

He will be taking the position of Joint Secretary V.S. Pandey, former minister Murli Manohar Joshi’s trusted representative. At a meeting on May 31, directors of the IIMs had told Singh they were pained by the ‘‘tone and tenor’’ of the ministry, and Pandey, while dealing with them. Pandey is known to have taken a confrontational approach, rubbing the directors the wrong way.

Banerjee’s visit is expected to undo the bitterness caused by Joshi and his bureaucrats who ended up alienating the faculty and a large cross-section of the students who believed the Ministry was interfering with the IIMs. Further, the faculty were accused of bungling funds without proof. They were told they might have to discontinue their consultancy work and their executive training development programmes.

Banerjee’s brief will be to assuage hurt feelings, especially in the faculties of the three premier institutes — IIM Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Kolkata. The official may study the campuses to plan the three new IIMs that it wants to set up.