All new teachers at the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) may have to teach 160 hours a year despite faculty protests against the move and a series of other reforms proposed by two government panels.
The Human Resource Development (HRD) ministry has asked the country's new seven IIMs to implement the new criterion while hiring faculty, top government officials have told HT.
The older IIMs too have the ministry's approval in-principle to use the controversial new rule in hiring new faculty, officials said, adding that the government was clear that it had no intention of forcing any IIM to accept any reform.
“We have instructed the new IIMs to adopt this condition while hiring faculty. The older IIMs too can adopt the mechanism while hiring the new faculty,“ a senior official said. The new IIMs are completely dependent on government funding while the IIMs in Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Calcutta hardly depend on any government aid.
The new rule -the first attempt to put in place a minimum number of teaching hours for IIM faculty -will not automatically extend to the current faculty. Only if the Boards of Governors of individual IIMs approve the move, can it be applied to the older faculty, sources said.
Boards can also exempt faculty who want to focus on research and are therefore unable to teach for 160 hours a year.
Panels appointed by HRD minister Kapil Sibal under Maruti Chairman RC Bhargava and Rediff boss Ajit Balakrishnan proposed a series of changes including increasing the number of teaching hours for every faculty member at the IIMs from about 100 on average to about 160 and reducing the size of IIM Boards.
The reform proposals include dramatically changing the “ownership“ of the IIMs to make membership of the managing societies of the premier B-schools dependent on large donations, and increasing the power of Boards.
