No fee cut, from each as per his means is HRD’s new IIM formula

• The IIMs will provide free education to students from families with total income less than Rs 1.5 lakh per year.

• For those families earning Rs 1.5 lakh to Rs 5 lakh, the IIMs will ensure that the students receive bank loans on easy terms to pay the Rs 1.5-lakh annual fee.

• And for those who earn more than Rs 5 lakh a year, the IIMs will charge the current fee of Rs 1.5 lakh. These figures and slabs are tentative pending discussions with the IIMs. But this is being floated as a ‘‘compromise formula.’’ Directors from the top three IIMs, Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Kolkata, are said to have shown ‘‘adequate interest’’ in this proposal when they met HRD Secretary S C Tripathi during their visit to Delhi last Tuesday.

As the agenda is prepared for the big meeting next Monday when all six IIM directors troop to Delhi, bureaucrats believe that such a structure also insulates the new Government from the ‘‘charge of being elitist.’’ Asked wasn’t this an invitation for misuse depending on who attests income credentials, officials said that ‘‘a mechanism would be put in place’’ to prevent this. Sources in the IIM A board of governors said that this proposal is quite ‘‘feasible’’ and has been discussed in internal meetings of the institute. What IIM directors have also agreed in their initial meeting with the HRD Secretary is that they would publicise in their brochures that lack of money is no reason why one cannot aspire to study at IIMs. This was not done before and Shastri Bhavan mandarins think this might have ‘‘alienated’’ the IIMs from the economically deprived classes.

In lieu, the bureaucrats are proposing—essentially on the basis of the Shunglu committee report—that the Centre won’t fund the three established IIMs as well as IIM Lucknow. Only the younger institutes at Indore and Kozhikode will continue to receive Central support to an upper limit of Rs 1 crore per year. There are other plans being made. Senior bureaucrats assert that there should be three more IIMs, one in the

North, another in the North East and another along the eastern coastline anywhere between Bhubaneswar and Chennai. Hyderabad and Vizag could compete for this third spot.