Abstract
Management education in India, especially the one offered at the IIMs, is the most sought-after professional choice among the youth pursuing higher education and attracts some of the best and the brightest students. Despite the popularity and centrality of the management education in the higher education landscape, a serious assessment of the field of management education in India has been rather few and far between. While there had been sporadic reflections and occasional critiques, a critical stocktaking of the institutional and disciplinary aspects of management education has been long wanting. This introductory essay gestures towards an interrelated array of factors that have a bearing on the overall purpose, and future direction, of management education in India. Besides presenting synoptic overview of the essays collected in the volume, it particularly underlines the global geopolitics of the theory and praxis of management and underlines the need to incorporate the perspectives of the Global South to move beyond the prevailing Western ethnocentrism.
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Notes
- 1.
The entry criteria set in common admission test (CAT) to IIMs largely tests quantitative aptitude and thus favours the engineers. This gives rise to a typical management class with disproportionate proportion of engineering graduates.
- 2.
However, the course structure at IIM Calcutta addresses these larger concerns. The IIM Calcutta PGP curriculum has compulsory courses such as Indian Economic and Political History, Environment and Development, Indian Social Structure, Indian Legal Structure, India and the World Economy. For details, see Bose (2005: 159).
- 3.
The Bhargava Committee for the IIM Review (2008) was the seventh committee in the history of the IIMs and the third Review Committee. The first committee was established in 1959 by the Planning Commission to finding suitable managers for the public sector enterprises. Prof George Robbins of the Graduate School of Business, University of California, was invited to formulate a scheme to set up an All India Institute of Management Studies. This was followed by the Ravi Mathai committee in 1972 which recommended the need to have two more IIMs. In 1981, the first Review Committee headed by H.P. Nanda felt that the existing three IIMs at Calcutta, Ahmedabad and Bangalore had reached their optimum capacity and recommended establishing two new IIMs and Fellowship Programmes to meet the demand for teachers in the management schools. The V. Kurien second Review Committee of 1992 proposed that IIMs stop depending on the government for their annual operating expenses (“Non-Plan expenses”) and suggested that corpus funds be created at each IIM. In 2004, V.K. Shunglu, ex-C&AG, Government of India, was asked to study the finances of the IIMs. In 2007, the Veerapa Moily Committee recommendation led to the IIMs (by then seven) dramatically raising their annual PGP intake from 1800 in 2008–2800 by 2010, with 52 % of the increased intake being reserved for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Class (SC, ST and OBC) candidates (IIM Review 2008).
- 4.
Some of the most important ones are: AACSB—The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (based in Tampa, Florida); AMBA—The Association of MBAs (based in London); EQUIS—European Quality Improvement System (based in Brussels).
- 5.
For instance, the NIRF, for assessing the total number of citations of publications based on the three Western standard Data Bases: Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar, and based on the publications in journals listed in FT-45, Scopus and Google Scholar.
- 6.
Academicians criticize HRD rankings of universities <http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-academicians-criticise-hrd-rankings-of-universities-2199846>.
- 7.
The 19 IIMs are: Indian Institute of Management at Ahmedabad; Amritsar; Bangalore; Bodh Gaya; Calcutta; Raipur; Rohtak; Kashipur; Kozhikode; Lucknow; Indore; Nagpur; Ranchi; Sambalpur; Sirmaur; Udaipur; Shillong; Tiruchirappalli; Visakhapatnam <http://mhrd.gov.in/iims>.
- 8.
Urmi A. Goswami, “IIM-Lucknow objects to umbrella board plan,” Economic Times December 23, 2008 <http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2008-12-23/news/28663949_1_iim-lucknow-pan-iim-board-r-c-bhargava>.
- 9.
Harvard Business School in India, <http://www.exed.hbs.edu/programs/bgei/Pages/india.aspx>.
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Babu, R.R., Thakur, M. (2017). The State of Management Education in India: Trajectories and Pathways. In: Thakur, M., Babu, R. (eds) Management Education in India. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-1696-7_1
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