This is a busy time of the year on Indian Institute of Management campuses. Scouts of companies and banks are making impassioned sales pitches to the graduating class. It is a sign of the excellence these institutes nurture that top executives are deployed to woo their business administration post-graduates. It is a state of affairs that makes India Shine. It makes India rightfully proud. Along with the IITs, the IIMs occupy much of the space at the top of the educational pyramid. They are evidence that India’s best and brightest are guaranteed a shot at world-class education. Indeed, they are the engines in realising India’s potential to emerge as a knowledge superpower. So, when this newspaper joins issue with the human resources development ministry on the limits of intervention in the functioning of the IIMs, the issue entails much more than a simple calculation of the fee charged from students. It takes a sweep of that entire pyramid, the entire matrix of educational institutions that helps sustain a welfare state.On Thursday, the Supreme Court upheld the ministry’s decree that the six IIMs slash their fee from Rs 1.5 lakh a year to Rs 30,000. In the course of the hearings on a petition challenging the new fee structure, however, the government has committed itself to maintaining the functional autonomy of the IIMs. This promise, HRD Minister Murli Manohar Joshi must know, will be strictly monitored. An ugly war has already broken out over who is the victor in this round: the minister, the petitioners, or the institutes themselves? It matters little. What is of greater consequence is that the questions the fee cut elicited in the first place remain unanswered.The basic premise in advocating lower tuition costs is that this would throw open the IIMs to the poor and under-privileged. Only if that were so! As mentioned above, the institutes are at the very top of a sprawling education pyramid. Gaining entry into the campus presumes long years of quality education, at the school and undergraduate level. Clearing the stringent and thorough screening process for post-graduate courses at the top management institutes requires conversance with the debates and ideas of the day. Far too many of this country’s able and deserving are kept at the fringes because they cannot access all this at the primary and undergraduate levels. A bright future lies in leaving the IIMs alone to do what they know how to do best, and devoting the government’s funds and attentions to enabling millions of students to reach for the best.
