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Vinod Mathew

Ahmedabad , Nov. 24

THE `all faculty meeting' of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIMA), which lasted almost the entire afternoon on Monday, has taken a serious note of the alleged leakage of the `Common Admission Test' question papers. The dons of the country's premier B-school unanimously authorised its Chairman of Admissions Committee to seek a `retest' at the earliest.

While trying to shake off any image of itself as playing the leader, the IIMA will play host to the Admission Committee Chairpersons meeting on Tuesday that will be represented by the respective chairmen of the other IIMs as well. This will be followed by a meeting of the directors of the six IIMs, also at the IIMA, on Wednesday. It is then that the nitty-gritty of the entire process of calling the aspiring management students once again to the examination halls will be decided.

Seemingly, the IIMA had been put on the hot seat once again though it tried to carry on its routine activities of conducting classes, only a day after the three-day `confluence meet' that got over on Sunday. While the meet attracted some 300 participants, spanning 20 international and 12 domestic B-schools, there is now an uneasy feeling within the campus that this unsavoury episode has raised questions about the institute's credibility.

Making matters intriguing are the recent efforts by the Union Ministry of Human Resource Development to whittle down the enormous level of autonomy enjoyed by the three major IIMs - Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Kolkata.

According to sources in the IIMA, it was only in October that the Ministry put pressure on the IIMs to postpone CAT this year. Realising that the effort was being mounted with the purpose of changing the present pattern of CAT where interviews and group discussions enjoy much weightage, the IIM dons stalled, citing that it was too late in the day and one could consider it during the next academic year.

Surely, it not without reason that the IIMA is being put under the microscope by the Government, as over two-thirds of the Rs 100 crore plus corpus generated by the three major IIMs trace its origin to Ahmedabad. In the backdrop of some Rs 4 crore that the Centre gives as grant to IIMA, there is a growing school of thought within the campus here that it may be time to cut the Government strings on the strength of its individual corpus. And it is precisely this likelihood that is worrying the Ministry, points out a faculty of IIMA.

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