Most Indians, especially those in the political class, tend to think of the Indian Institute(s) of Management as an unqualified success -- in terms of the salaries their graduates command, in terms of the number of people who apply (140 candidates per seat), and the international recognition of 'Brand IIM'.
The IIM Review Committee headed by R C Bhargava, chairman of Maruti Suzuki India and a retired officer of the Indian Administrative Service, has does a good job of puncturing this myth.
While recognising that the IIMs have become a respected brand, the committee points to the huge challenges ahead and the likelihood that their premier position may have a lot to do with the IIMs just being the first game in town.
The IIMs, the review committee points out, do not figure in the lists of most global B-school surveys, their salaries may be high by Indian standards but don't match up to global scales, few of their faculty papers are to be found in prestigious management journals, and few senior managers of Indian firms go back to the IIMs for refresher programmes
.the list goes on.
To it might be added the fact that there are few management gurus from the IIMs who find their work referred to, as is the case with CK Prahalad, Jagdish Sheth or Sumantra Ghoshal; indeed, few leading Indian companies appear to be getting strategic help from IIM professors or asking them to sit on their boards.
Having identified the problems, the review committee trots out solutions that are pretty much par for the course.
First comes institutional autonomy -- a pan-IIM board with 15 members, of whom only a third will be appointed by the government, is to be created to chart out common strategies and a strategic vision for all the IIMs; the boards of the present IIMs should be halved in order to make them more manageable, and independent professionals should constitute the majority on these panels; each board should have the power to raise fees and jack up salary levels to competitive levels; and so on.
The committee correctly points out that while the current board appoints an IIM's director, it is a government search committee that actually chooses him and the appointments committee of the Cabinet ratifies the choice.
The board then is pretty much a rubber stamp.
Similarly, since the government controls the use of funds, including a corpus that may have been built up with donations, there is little incentive for the IIMs to try and raise a corpus.
All of this is true, and solutions need to be found, but that does not mean that the review committee's suggestions will find ready acceptance.
Indeed, it may be unrealistic to expect he who pays the piper to not call the tune, especially when politicians and civil servants often have empire-building and power-seeking as their primary objectives.
Autonomy comes from a cultural and intellectual acceptance of how an educational institution should be run, and from the faculty's and institute management's ability to excel and thus to earn autonomy through general respect.
Indeed, some institute boards have been able to do quite a lot within the limitations of the existing framework, so the primary issue may not even be greater autonomy, especially since the IIMs may in fact have had more autonomy than many universities.
The restrictive rules of the game (UGC pay scales and the like) are not going to be easily got rid of, even if the government allows more independent directors and the setting up of a pan-IIM board as a buffer between the government and the IIMs.
It is also naïve for the committee to place great faith in independent directors when even individuals of the stature of NR Narayana Murthy (IIM-A chairman) have given in to government demands.