IIMs Have a dismal diversity record and the new bill isn't going to fix that

Abstract

On the last day of the first part of the current Budget session of parliament, the government introduced the Indian Institutes of Management Bill 2017 (IIM Bill). The primary intention of the proposed legislation is to enable India’s premier public management institutes to award masters and doctoral degrees rather than diplomas. The Bill proposes to grant the IIMs a level of structural and functional autonomy that is unprecedented for any Indian public university. The legislation is a product of more than two years of deliberation between the government and the IIMs. Despite placatory public pronouncements by both IIMs and the government, the proposed legislation does not adequately recognise (let alone address) the problem of social diversity – one of the most important predicaments for universities around the world, especially public institutions. IIMs currently suffer from a grave social diversity deficit, especially in the composition of its faculty. The data that we compiled using RTI replies is presented in the table below. At the time of writing this article, only 13 out of the 20 IIMs have independent full-time faculty bodies and only six of these 13 institutions responded to our RTI queries with actual data. The remaining institutions used every obfuscation strategy available in the book to skirt our queries (we have appeals as well as fresh RTI applications pending at these institutions). We have data for 233 faculty members across six IIMs. Two faculty members across all these institutions are from the scheduled castes (SC) group and five from other backward classes (OBC). There are no faculty members belonging to scheduled tribes (ST). While at this time we are able to report data on only six IIMs, anecdotal evidence points to a diversity deficit at the remaining institutions that is at least as acute. Read more at: https://thewire.in/rights/social-diversity-deficit-iim