More IIMs needed, but where are the teachers?

New Delhi, Aug 19: India needs many more elite institutes of management in the public sector but the problem of a severe shortage of quality faculty needs to be addressed urgently, according to Dr Sujit Basu, Director of the prestigious Gurgaon-based Management Development Institute (MDI).

He said more institutions such as the Indian Institutes of Management (IIM) were needed to ensure that quality education was available even to the poorest sections of the society.

''We need more IIMs certainly, but at the same time, we should know where we are going to get teachers from. Basically all these institutions will need good teachers,'' Dr Basu told UNI in an interview.

''In the north-east, there are many centrally-funded educational institutions but not many have good teachers. Merely having an institution doesn't help. You need to have a good faculty.

Otherwise it's just like playing with the future of our country,'' he said.

India currently has six IIMs at Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Kolkata, Lucknow, Kozhikode and Indore. The seventh IIM is expected to start functioning from the next academic year at Shillong.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, in his Independence Day address to the nation last Wednesday, announced that the government was planning to set up seven more IIMs, along with eight new Indian Institutes of Technology, 20 Indian Institutes of Information Technology, five more Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research and 30 new Central Universities.

A quick glance at some of the statistics about higher education will make it evident that the Indian education system is in a state of moribundity.

There are severe resource constraints, especially in the form of human capital. In particular, there is a shortage of trained teachers, from schools to universities.

Even the IIMs and other top management schools around the country are facing the problem, thanks to the meagre salaries on offer, which are much lower than what an alumnus of these colleges gets at the start of his or her career. As a result, many of the faculty members of IIMs, who are highly-qualified, look for opportunities in the corporate world.

Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh admitted to a severe shortage of faculty at the various IIMs in a written reply in the Rajya Sabha earlier this year. While IIM-Kozhikode had a faculty strength of 17 against the sanctioned strength of 40, the numbers were 70 and 88 for IIM-Calcutta, 83 and 85 for IIM-Ahmedabad, 74 and 89 for IIM-Bangalore and 31 and 33 for IIM-Indore.

"Retaining good faculty has become a major problem in B-schools here. India has to think about it seriously or it can impede economic growth of the country. The other missing piece of the puzzle is research facilities," participants at a recent seminar on the issue in Ahmedabad said.

Moreover, most of the IIMs have ambitious growth plans which would need even more teachers.

According to Dr Basu, the only alternative is to allow a greater role in the area of management education to the private sector. However, then the quintessential question of the mushrooming growth of private MBA institutions, compromiising the quality of education, and the corporatisation of the education sector comes to the forefront.

Dr Basu differs on this and said, ''I would not give a straight cut prescription of curbing these private institutions but quality control does need to be in place. Perhaps these institutions are playing a role. Otherwise, where will the students go?'' The MDI director went on to add that all private institutes were not set up with a commercial motive. ''Even if they have been set up with business motive, I do not find anything wrong in that as long as they deliver quality,'' he added.

Higher fees in most of the institutions meant their courses would become out of reach for more students. Even if the supply was increased in the form of more institutes, individuals had to be able to afford them.

''Fees are going to go up anyway because government does not have enough money to run institutes of higher education. Their priority is not higher education, rather it should not be. With so many illiterates and rural people in the country, I think their priority is and should be providing primary and secondary education,'' the director said.

The organisation of international academy has changed, whereas Indian universities have remained tradition-bound. Dr Basu said that the first IIMs were set up in Ahmedabad and Kolkata way back in 1961 when the country did not have any provision for management education. It was as part of the second five-year plan that IIM Calcutta and IIM Ahmedabad were set up primarily to meet the needs of the heavy industries that came up during the first five-year plan.

The country today needs an education system which is economically efficient, socially equitable, functionally effective, and consonant with the altered needs of the present, Dr Basu said.

He said that MDI, rated consistently among the top ten business schools in the country, had realised this need and was starting a management convention focusing on Rural Marketing.

''In rural areas, there is a lot of emphasis on self-help groups nowadays, like programmes to empower women, particularly those who produce beautiful handicrafts and other products. But there is a terrific problem in terms of making working capital available to them. Even after production, they do not know how to market their products. There is a very large demand for all this in the sense that they need help,'' the director said.

Though the government occasionally organised fairs for them but they needed to be helped on a continuous basis. ''Our students felt the need and decided to organise this convention,'' he added.

UNI