With the Ministry of Human Resource Development clearing its stand on allowing Indian Institutes of Management to go global, several IIMs are set to put forth their proposals before HRD Minister Arjun Singh at a meeting on February 1.
The move was set in motion by IIM Bangalore that decided to amend its Memorandum of Association (MoA) on Friday at a meeting of its board of governors.
IIM-B Director Prakash G Apte said in Bangalore that the MoA signed in 1973, when the institute was established, did not include a clause about expanding its activities outside the country.
But there appears to be a climbdown on the part of IIM Bangalore as Apte said they would open a ‘virtual campus’ for executives in Singapore. Earlier, IIM Bangalore was eager to have a physical campus in Singapore.
According to official sources, IIM Bangalore is not alone to go global with virtual campuses. IIM Kolkata also plans to have a virtual campus for executives in Dubai and other Middle-East countries where the presence of Indian executives is high. IIM Ahmedabad is looking for options abroad. Some Saarc countries are believed to have asked the IIMs to start short and mid duration courses for company executives. The IIMs have been asked to come with plans for open virtual campus in other countries at the February 1 meeting.
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.
