There is, apparently, a philosophy behind the fees. The Indian Institutes of Management are now, quite literally, being made to pay for having come robustly of age. The Union human resource development minister, Mr Murli Manohar Joshi, has directed the six IIMs to cut their annual fees down to Rs 30,000 from Rs 1.5 lakh, from the 2004-05 session. This happened on the day that the Lok Sabha was dissolved, with the IIMs only coming to know of it from the press. The directive comes at the end of a long struggle of wills between Mr Joshi and the IIMs. At the heart of this struggle is the issue of these institutions’ autonomy, even as Mr Joshi’s misguided peremptoriness becomes yet another instance of his ministry’s agency in bringing about the decline of quality higher education in the country. The IIMs have, of course, been prepared for this, and their earlier cautiously diplomatic rhetoric in keeping Mr Joshi’s meddlesomeness at bay has now been sharpened into a more concerted and definite resistance. The chairman of IIM Ahmedabad had earlier declined a large part of the ministry’s annual grant on grounds of “social responsibility”. His institute had enough money to support its own expenditure; so Mr Joshi should spend the government’s money on more essential expenses. That this was a move to minimize obligations to the ministry and thereby pre-empt inroads into its academic independence had occurred to most. Eminent Catholic schools in Calcutta have done this sort of thing with the West Bengal government to fend off interference.

Mr Joshi’s directive is, of course, propped up by a highly selective and ad hoc reading of the U.R. Rao committee recommendations. Ironically, Mr Rao is now distancing himself from this particular use of his own report. He feels that there has been a misapplication of the letter of his recommendations, while disregarding the spirit in which they were made. Mr Joshi’s meddling with the IIMs goes well beyond the issue of the fees. The democratization of quality management education must also include a single national-level entrance examination and the scrapping of the group discussion assessments (because they lead to social discrimination). But most damagingly, he has decided to tinker with the student-teacher ratio, demanding that the IIMs take in considerably more students. They might even be asked to cut down on staff and allocate more work to those who are still on the rolls. Mr Joshi’s inability to distinguish between the demands of excellence and elitist excess comes garbed, therefore, in a rhetoric of democratic utilitarianism.

The faculty and students of these distinguished institutes feel that Mr Joshi’s measures are addressing a problem which simply does not exist. The IIMs remain strictly meritocratic, and nobody who has cleared admissions has been turned away for not being able to afford the fees. By forcing the IIMs to accept Central subsidies, Mr Joshi proves yet again that his own regressive notions of higher education are inimical to the spirit of both autonomy and merit.