It is strange that India’s show-piece IIMs, promoted and heavily funded by the Central government for the past half-century, have contributed very little to improvement of the deplorable condition of government organisations and systems. On the contrary their graduates are anxious to improve the efficiency of already well- managed companies in the private sector, even as government continues to use antiquated, obsolete, cumbersome and oppressive public administrative systems and decision-making processes for national development.
National development depends on the appropriateness and relevance of management concepts (MCs) — education, training, research and application — in all sectors of political, economic and social life. Unfortunately MCs developed in India during the past 50 years have impacted only 2 percent of the country’s 450 million workforce, and at best 20 percent of the organised sector workforce of 50 million. MCs in the dominant agriculture, governance, administration, public and infrastructure sectors are sub-optimal and/or under-developed.
India’s IIMs are essentially pale imitations of Western B-schools, and hence inadequate, inappropriate and irrelevant to our complex situation. Most faculty are US trained, and don’t seem to be aware that the national priority in India is infrastructure management — efficient management of water and sewage systems, electricity and coal mines and garbage clearance, as also provision of water and toilets for 500 million citizens.
Instead, the great majority of IIM graduates sign up with already well-managed MNCs and Indian companies, investment banks and financial services firms in the organised sector of the economy which employs a mere 10 million citizens. These elite B-schools have failed to impact the government sector which employs 20 million bureaucrats, or infrastructure — power, railways, roadways, PWD, ports, irrigation — companies. Even the education system, which desperately requires thinkers and managers, has few attractions for IIM graduates.
Much can be done to increase the effectiveness of our IIMs. A massive programme of short-term management development courses should be conducted by them for government officials. IIM-Bangalore has shown the way. Recently it established two management institutes at Chennai and Trivandrum to train government bureaucrats and conduct research for government. Moreover IIM-B has taken the lead and conducted training programmes for the ministries of transport, power, health, habitat, environment and water resources, which are the great bottlenecks of national development. The other IIMs should follow suit to train people who manage the country’s massive utility corporations and public sector companies.
After half a century since IIM-Calcutta was promoted in 1961, the country’s 11 IIMs need to emerge from their ivory towers and engage with India’s real economy. Even as a new era in which the IIMs will enjoy greater academic, financial and administrative autonomy dawns, their managements need to combine revenue generation innovations with deep research into ways and means to introduce modern MCs into Indian agriculture, governance, administration and infrastructure management. It’s about time the country’s highly acclaimed IIMs realise that it’s better to make small improvements in the core sectors of the economy, than dramatic improvements in peripheral areas.
(Prof. N.S. Ramaswamy is the founder director of NITIE, Mumbai, Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies, Mumbai and IIM-Bangalore)