The Hindu : A bolt from the blue

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Nov 30, 2003

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A bolt from the blue

That the CAT question paper could be leaked was unthinkable... the incident can be used to clip the IIMs' wings, says Anita Joshua.

THIS WAS something the 1.27 lakh candidates registered for last Sunday's Common Admission Test for the premier Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) had not reckoned with. Neither had their prohibitively priced `we-know-it-all' coaching centres prepared them for such an eventuality.

For it was unthinkable — nay, well nigh impossible — that the question paper of the `mother of all management examinations' could be leaked. The students' anger and frustration, and the general sense of outrage, were inevitable. After all, the IIMs, as public opinion goes, are the only surviving islands of educational excellence, besides the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), in a set-up where institutions are fast becoming hollow structures.

Adding insult to injury, the investigations revealed that what the sleuths of the Central Bureau of Investigation busted in a Delhi hotel in the wee hours of the morning of November 23 was just the tip of the iceberg. The four `medicos' arrested from a city hotel were allegedly part of an organised gang having a nationwide network with stakes running into several crores of rupees.

Arrests in other parts of the country revealed that the gang had been leaking out papers of various all-India competitive examinations, including those of the medical entrance, for some years now. The swoops and arrests across the country are only of clinical interest, as the CAT paper leak brought into the open a quiet tug-of-war that has been going on between the IIMs and the Union Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) for sometime now.

In fact, the incident could not have come at a more inopportune time for the IIMs which have been fighting to protect their turf from what many insiders see as the MHRD's attempts to dilute their autonomy. And the general fear now is that the Ministry may well use it for forcing its writ on the IIMs.

On October 10 this year, the Ministry announced that admissions on an all-India basis to the MBA/PGDM or their equivalent programmes in all the institutions across the country would be through a common All India Test, starting from the academic year 2005-06. Should this come into force, the IIMs may also have to do away with the post-entrance test group discussions and interviews as "admissions would be made strictly on the basis of merit based on this test, and seat allocation would be coordinated by a central authority". While the Ministry has taken the plea that such "streamlining of admissions" to the MBA/PGDM, or their equivalent, is in pursuance of a Supreme Court judgment, the IIMs have said that the only way they will accept the decision is in the event of CAT being made the common examination system.

Though similar streamlining will be applicable to admissions on an all-India basis for engineering, architecture/planning and pharmacy programmes besides Masters in Computer Applications, the IITs and two other institutions admitting students on an all-India basis through the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) have been left out of the common engineering examination. Why the IITs have been exempted but not the IIMs which belong to the same league is not clear — particularly because CAT is as much an all-India examination as JEE. In fact, it is no secret that for some years, the Government has been trying to get the IITs to abandon their JEE and join the fledgling All India Engineering Entrance Examination (AIEEE) in vain.

A common entrance test, according to the former director IIT, Chennai, P.V. Indiresan, is a "recipe for disaster; no different from ganga jal as a cure-all for every ill and every sin." Conceding that parents preferred a single examination, he maintained that it would be a folly to put all the eggs into one basket. "Because CAT was blown, admissions to over 60 institutions using its scores have been affected." Besides, given the numbers that appear for various management/engineering entrance examinations, "how will the system decide whom to admit when there are several students with identical scores", Prof. Indiresan asked.

While comparisons are often made with the American system where the scores of common examinations — GRE/SAT/GMAT — are accepted by academic institutions, educationists point out that it is only one of the criteria for admission. The same cannot be replicated here because the quality of education is so varied, and pulls and pressures on institutions so intense that the admission system would be subject to considerable manipulation.

As the former Education Secretary, Anand Sarup, put it, "the fact that these entrance examinations are being held is a commentary of the lack of faith institutions have on the grading system of schools/universities". It is not just CAT that has been a bone of contention between the IIMs and the Ministry. Early this year, the setting up of the Bharat Shiksha Kosh by the Government to mobilise extra-budgetary resources to finance education put the IIMs and the IITs on a collision course of sorts with the Ministry as it insisted that all donations going to them should be routed through this Fund.

Then came the bid to freeze the cash reserves of the IIMs at Rs. 25 crores and the insistence that each institute sign a Memorandum of Understanding with the Ministry disclosing its plans for the future. Also, as in the case with the IITs, the Ministry asked the IIMs to increase their intake. And, more recently, the HRD Minister, Murli Manohar Joshi, suggested that they reduce their fees in the hope of regulating the business school market where annual fees run into several lakhs.

While the top-of-the-line IIMs — Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Kolkata (ABC) — are yet to sign the MoU, the other three have apparently fallen in line as the Ministry threatened to cut off funds. Sitting as the ABC of B-schools do on cash reserves exceeding Rs. 25 crores, they could have put up a fight, but there is a private acknowledgment that it is easier said than done because the IIMs do enjoy the fruits of being part of the system.

What the IIMs are confounded with is the doublespeak of a Government which, on the one hand, is urging institutions of higher education to become self-sufficient, while going after those successfully managing to do so, on the other. "Centralisation and liberalisation cannot go hand-in-hand," they say, hankering back to the Nehruvian era when the state sponsored higher education while allowing the institutions complete autonomy in their management.

How this battle for control over one of the most-sought after institutions of the country plays itself out remains to be seen. Forced on the defensive by the paper leak, the only consolation is the faith that companies still have in an IIM MBA, and the knowledge that the IITs survived the breach of the JEE in 1997 and the venerable Civil Services Examination a leak of its preliminary examination paper in 1991.

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