No IIT way for new IIMs

The Indian Institutes of Management have expressed their inability to the HRD Ministry to mentor their newer counterparts the IIT way....

The Indian Institutes of Management have expressed their inability to the HRD Ministry to mentor their newer counterparts the IIT way ,citing limited faculty and resources. While they have agreed to play mentor by sharing curricula design,training faculty and occasionally sharing their staff,they have put their foot down on letting these fledgling institutions operate from their campuses.

The HRD ministrys focus on mentoring began with six new IITs set up last year with help from their older counterparts. The handholding went to the extent of IIT Kanpur sharing its campus with IIT Rajasthan and IIT Guwahati running IIT Patna. The Ministry,which had hoped to follow the same model for the IIMs,was instead asked by the IIMs to allow them to set up branches instead of going for new IIMs. While this suggestion was rejected by the Ministry,the IIM Review Committee Report in 2008 made yet another case for the mentoring model claiming that this would ensure the brand value of the premier institutes was not diluted.

Sources said that while IIM Ahmedabad will mentor the IIM in Rajasthan,IIM Bangalore and IIM Kozhikode are both expected to mentor the IIM Trichy. IIM Indore will mentor the IIM in Chhattisgarh while IIM Lucknow will focus on the IIM Rohtak in Haryana. The IIM in Jharkhand planned at Ranchi will be mentored by IIM Calcutta. The mentor for the IIMs in Uttarakhand and J&K is yet to be decided.

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The pre-condition for mentoring was that each of the new institutes come with a duly appointed Director and at least a dozen faculty members. While the existing IIMs will share design and curriculum,train faculty and also train the staff in processes,sharing of faculty is not going to be the norm. The existing IIMs will share faculty on a very selective and case to case basis, a highly placed source said.

While each of the new IIMs will be allocated Rs 290-300 crore to start operations and establish themselves over the next 5-6 years,the existing IIMs feel that more funding may be needed.

A special committee,with two IIM directors and an IIT director on board,set up to examine ways of setting up new IIMs had advised against forced collaboration in its report submitted to the Ministry earlier this year. It advocated more freedom to grow,technology upgrade,slow expansion plans for new IIMs and new methods of pedagogy and examination systems. The mentoring middle ground was finally arrived at after a round of meetings with all IIM directors in April this year.

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