The grant for the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), one of the country’s popular business schools, has been cut by half this year by the Centre. According to top institutions, the move may hurt new IIMs, but not second or first generation IIMs. There are 20 IIMs across the country.
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced in the budget 2023-24, the funding for IIMs has been brought down to Rs 300 crore from the previous fiscal year’s Revised Estimate (RE) of Rs 608.23 crore, a 50.67% drop even when the net budget for the fiscal year 2023-24 rose by 8% amounting to Rs 44,094 crores for the higher education sector.
According to the Budget Estimates (BE) for 2022-23, the IIMs were allocated an amount of Rs 653.92 crores. According to IIM Udaipur Director Ashok Banerjee, the government might be sending signals to IIMs to be more innovative in funding their growth plans.
“The cut in budget allocation for the IIMs may hurt the newer IIMs, the latest IIM is about seven years old though,” Banerjee said.
However, through this cut, the government perhaps is sending signals to the leadership of individual IIMs to be more innovative in funding their growth plans like promoting use of the PPP model and also to the industry to support academic institutions of national importance through CSR initiatives and other donations,” he said.
The major cut in the budget for IIMs has been under the support from Gross Budgetary Support (GBS) head. The allocation for the purpose was Rs 296.81 crore according to the RE for 2022-23 while the BE allocation was Rs 323.50 crore. For the new financial year (2023-24), the allocation under the head has been reduced to Rs 15.17 crore.
IIM Rohtak has never hung on to any government grant, Dheeraj Sharma, Director, IIM Rohtak said. “We generate our total revenue from various training programmes remote and on campus and tuition fees. Though we are a second generation IIM, this halving of funds will not affect us. New generation IIMs might have to depend on government grants,” he added.
Furthermore, Ajit Parulekar, Director of Goa Institute of Management (GIM), said there might not be anything specific for B-school education in India, but the finance minister talking about a National Data Governance framework was one of the highlights of the budget.
Parulekar further added, “This framework will allow us to get access to a lot of non-personal, anonymous data. Research-intensive institutions will benefit greatly from this because one of the biggest hurdles one needs to overcome during the conducting of research is the lack of data.”
Meanwhile, Ashutosh Dash, associate professor, accounting and finance, Management Development Institute (MDI), Gurugram said though the provisions made in the budget will improve the education infrastructure in the country as a whole, the reduction of gross budgetary support from 323.5 crores in 2022-23 to 15.17 crores in 2023-24 might have a huge impact on the growth and development of newly established IIMs.
“To implement the NEP 2020 in the true spirit, the best institutions and universities of the country have been given an additional Rs 4,235.74 crore but how much can the share of IIMs be is unknown yet,” he said.
With inputs from PTI
