In 2017, Parliament passed the Indian Institutes of Management (IIM) Act. The Act, which hugely expanded the autonomy already enjoyed by the IIMs, contains an important clause. It requires the Board of Governors (BoG) of the IIMs to commission an independent review of the institutes at least once every three years and place the report in the public domain.
Six years on, very few of the 20 IIMs have done so. Among the top four IIMs, only the review report of IIM Bangalore is available on the website. This act of omission gives us an indication as to why the government thought fit to table the IIM (Amendment) Bill in Parliament last week. No government can take kindly to non-compliance with an Act of Parliament. The 2023 Bill seeks to take back from the IIMs the powers that the government ceded in 2017. The government seems to have judged that a dangerous governance vacuum has been created in the IIM system in the years since it relinquished control over these institutes.
