Class ACt: Murli Manohar Joshi (top). A lecture in progress at the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta. The campus (below)

Not far from the cavernous halls packed with students — young men and women in jeans and Tees hanging on to the words of their teachers —the surface of a small lake quivers in the afternoon breeze. A paved walkway, rimmed with towering silver oaks, edges past the water body green with weeds. The Indian Institute of Management (IIM) in Calcutta — the oldest of the six IIMs in the country — looks sylvan and tranquil. There are no signs, not on the surface at least, of any tumult anywhere on the sprawling campus.

But walk away from the lake and head into a warren of offices along the first-floor corridor of the administrative building, and you will feel the white heat of rage. Members of the faculty are seething with anger at what Murli Manohar Joshi’s human resource development (HRD) ministry is doing to this institution and its five cousins in Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Lucknow, Indore and Kozhikode.

In a sweeping decision undermining the autonomy of the country’s best B-Schools, HRD minister Joshi on February 5 ordered the IIMs to slash their annual tuition fees from Rs 1,50,000 to Rs 30,000 from the academic session starting this year. This was not the first instance of Joshi trying to exert his control over the IIMs, largely left untouched by successive governments in New Delhi over the last four decades or so.

Last year, he asked all management institutes affiliated to the All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE) to give up their respective admission tests in favour of a common examination devised by his ministry. The ABC of the IIMs — a reference to the three top IIMs in Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Calcutta — rejected the directive and declared their intention to go on with the common admission test or CAT.

But this time, the HRD-IIM face-off shows little signs of easing. The IIMs believe that the government move not only encroaches on their right to decide on the fee structure, guaranteed by the Memorandum of Association or the constitution of the institutes, but is aimed at making the institutes dependent on the ministry. And they don’t think that Joshi is going to stop here, for they believe that the minister’s appetite for control is on the rise.

“If we take it lying down, the next thing Mr Joshi and company are going to tell us is what to teach, whom to appoint and so on,” a faculty member at IIMC says.

For IIMs, the first jolt came about two years ago when Joshi dissolved search committees formed by the faculty council of each IIM to suggest a panel of names to the ministry for appointing directors. At IIMC, the post of director had fallen vacant in 2002 with Amitava Bose’s term coming to an end.

Subrata Ganguly, the then chairman of the board of governors, asked the ministry to let the faculty council form a search committee. The ministry sat over his request, prompting him to resign in protest. ITC chairman Y.C. Deveshwar was appointed in his place. The ministry declared that, when needed, it would appoint its own search committees at the IIMs.

Clearly, it’s not easy for a state-run institute to take on the government, no matter how “illogical, unwise or absurd” its diktat is, as IIMA director Bakul Dholakia put it. Hemmed in by government rules, the faculty members, not surprisingly, insist they remain nameless. With the sole exception of .R. Narayanamurthy of Infosys, who heads the governing board of IIMA, none of the chairmen of the other IIMs has yet spoken out against the order to cut fees. Phone calls to the office of Y.C. Deveshwar were not returned.

But there is, of course, not much that the chair can do — as Narayanamurthy’s attempts to temper his criticism of the fee cuts with remarks such as “Mr Joshi is a good man” and “we should not think he has any hidden agenda” indicate. The chairmen, and for that matter the boards of governors — none of whom have so far met to discuss the issue — have good reasons to keep to themselves for the present. The chairmen have no executive powers and cannot overrule the board. And, appointed by the Centre, the government expects them to toe the official line.

IIM staffers stress that a back channel, under the circumstances, is the only viable option left to the IIMs to skirt the government regulations and take Joshi on. And within hours of the HRD ministry’s directive becoming public, phones began to ring in the offices of former IIM students in senior and influential positions across the country. “Profs” were at the other end, calling in for help. E-mails, too, started flying back and forth. Soon, alumni associations of Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Calcutta had joined hands and formed an informal joint committee to fight the HRD ministry. Some had even started a signature campaign.

“This is something I have never witnessed in my long career here. This was a spontaneous outpouring of support from our alumni,” says an IIMC professor. A group of old students, now working for multi-national companies, called up a legal luminary, who advised that students, either present or former, file a public interest litigation. It was not long before Saikat Sengupta, a second-year student at IIMA, Anish Mathew, an IIMB alumnus, and Sandeep Parekh, an advocate, had filed a PIL with the Supreme Court. The PIL of February 10 challenged Joshi’s directive to slash fees.

“It’s impossible for us, being a government institute, to take on the mighty Indian government. But we are trying to make things difficult for them,” a former IIM-C director says.

For the IIMs, it is a double whammy, for the ministry has not just slashed their fees, but asked them to take in more students — a proposition that the institutes say is impossible without a corresponding increase in infrastructure.

The government, of course, believes that it is as easily said as done. An HRD official points out that the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) charges an annual fee of Rs 30,000 per student. “The IITs are equally prestigious institutes. But they don’t grumble about low fees,” he says. “In fact, the IITs have to spend on infrastructure like workshops and laboratories. The IIMs have only classroom lectures,” the official argues.

The HRD official stresses that the government foots all the bills for the IIMs — from buying property and meeting construction costs to paying professors. “So, the government has a right to decide on the fees.” Sandeep Parekh, the senior Supreme Court lawyer and one of the PIL petitioners, doesn’t believe so. He says Article 5 of the Memorandum of Association broadly allows the central government to take any decision regarding the IIMs, but only after an inquiry and only in consultation with the state government. Parekh says the central government did not follow any of it, so that “made the decision illegal”.

To press their case, faculty councils are chalking out plans and gearing up for a drawn-out battle outside the court. The IIMs plan to hold meetings, make out a case against the ministry and urge their respective boards to take it up with the government.

While the IIMB faculty council met a day after the announcement of the decision, IIMC met on Wednesday and formed a four-member committee to support its case. The IIMA’s board of governors is scheduled to meet on April 3 and IIMC’s faculty members expect a meeting in March to discuss the issue.

In business schools elsewhere, plans are also afoot. Not all management institutes affiliated to the AICTE and asked by the HRD ministry to reduce their fees on the recommendations of the U.R. Rao Committee are as restrained as the IIMs. The Xavier’s Labour Relations Institute (XLRI) in Jamshedpur has openly threatened to take the ministry to court if asked to cut its fees. “We haven’t got the order yet. But we are a private, minority institution and we get no funds from the ministry,” XLRI director Father P. D. Thomas says.

The Gurgaon-based Management Development Institute, a reputed B-School, says it will reduce the number of students if forced to reduce its fees. “We won’t be able to afford to pay for a student’s education, which costs the institute around Rs 5 lakh. But we charge only Rs 2.4 lakh per student,” MDI director Pritam Singh says. MDI, however, stresses that it does not want any “confrontation” with the Centre on the fee cuts. “MDI doesn’t feel the need to do anything. It's a government-regulated institution,” Singh says.

A section of people in the IIMs have been urging the administrators to lie low as well. Some have suggested that as “a tactical move,” the IIMs strike for a compromise. This group believes that to end the controversy that otherwise shows no signs of petering out, the IIMs should agree to “a small reduction” in fees. Or they could ask the government to fund indigent students by waiving their fees and instead charging them their salary for the first three months once they get jobs.

Some are in favour of discussing the issue with the government. “We haven’t had a dialogue with the ministry on the issue. So, why not start it now? Any hardening of our stance will make the matter worse and make the government more determined,” an IIMB faculty member says.

There is one issue, however, on which there is complete unanimity. The IIMs insist that the “core autonomy” cannot be compromised. “We should preserve our right to select our students, future faculty, programmes, duration, student strength etc.,” a note being circulated among the faculties in the three IIMs reads. “We can hope to win back in future what we may concede in a reconciliation move now.”

Members of the three faculties, meanwhile, are making efforts to informally reach out to the bureaucracy. “Some senior bureaucrats, mostly our former students, have already promised to lobby the government for us,” an IIM faculty member says. Some alumni have suggested that they should petition deputy prime minister L.K. Advani, capitalising on his strained relations with the HRD minister. “We are also making a move in that direction,” says an old student.

The faculties hope to strike fast before the election fever grips the country. “Once the campaign starts, the IIM issue will be all but forgotten,” a professor says. But the IIMs’ formidable human pool — comprising some of the best brains in the country—- is not going to throw in the towel. The focus now is on keeping the issue alive after elections.