IIM directors to meet Arjun today

A day before the directors of six Indian Institutes of Management are scheduled to meet Human Resource Development minister Arjun Singh, they discussed the issues concerning IIMs threadbare in the Capital on Tuesday.

Published on: Feb 1, 2006, 12:50:00 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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A day before the directors of six Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) are scheduled to meet Human Resource Development minister Arjun Singh, they discussed the issues concerning IIMs threadbare in the Capital on Tuesday.

Shekhar Chaudhari, director IIM Calcutta, who chaired the meeting, termed it as a ‘routine affair’ and said nothing extraordinary was discussed. “It was a meeting that was scheduled to be held in Kolkata on February 4, but was preponed as all IIM directors were coming to Delhi,” he said, refusing to reveal more.

The approximately four hour meeting continued till late in the evening with directors of all six IIMs raising their issues. The response that they have received from the ministry was also discussed. Sources said the meeting was not called to prepare a strategy for meeting with Singh but to discuss many of the pending issues. “Lot of issues were discussed and it was much more than the controversy over allowing campus outside India,” a source said.

IIMs have been under fire for charging exorbitant fee thereby depriving the poor section a top management education. The system of admission through the Combined Aptitude Test (CAT) is said to put students under pressure and there has been a demand to simplify the admission system on the lines of IIT-JEE.

All these issues are likely to be discussed when Arjun Singh meets all IIM directors on February 1. One of the major issues on the agenda is looking for ways to give more autonomy to IIMs. Singh has asked IIMs to come prepared to discuss all the issues and ways to strengthen IIM so that they can become international centres of excellence.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
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.Read More

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