IIMs oppose government PhD eligibility criteria, terms them ‘restrictive’

A fresh round of confrontation is brewing between the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) and the government, with top IIMs opposing the PhD eligibility criteria recently announced by the human resource development (HRD) ministry.

While the directors of all IIMs will hold a meeting on December 13 to firm up a consolidated view and take up the matter with the government, IIM Ahmedabad has taken the lead and written to the HRD ministry registering its strong objections to the PhD guidelines, said people aware of the matter.

Top IIMs are of the view that the government mandated eligibility criteria for PhD programmes at IIMs are “restrictive”, against the nature of the Fellow Programme in Management (FPM) and not in keeping with the autonomy promised to them by the government, said the people.

The ministry had sent a communication to directors of all IIMs on October 23 detailing the minimum standards for admissions to PhD programmes at the institutes.

Concerns have arisen over three aspects of the eligibility criteria – an 8 CGPA (cumulative grade points average) requirement for direct entry candidates (with a fouryear degree or B Tech), a two-year postgraduate diploma instead of a one-year version and the necessity of having a bachelor’s degree even with a professional qualification such as CA, CS or ICWA.

The IIMs do not agree with the stipulation that a PhD programme should run for at least three years, instead of two as proposed by the institutes, said one of the people cited earlier.

Most of the older IIMs currently offer the doctoral FPM through established institutional processes involving statement of purpose, one-hour long interviews and course work put through rigorous standards of assessment.

But now that the IIM Act, 2017, has come into effect, IIMs can offer PhD degrees instead. The government has issued guidelines in keeping with the standards mandated by the University Grants Commission (UGC), the higher education regulator, and practices followed at the Indian Institutes of Technology. The ministry has said that there should be parity among all institutes of national importance.

Many of the new eligibility criteria are, however, significantly different from the IIM FPM mechanisms.

IIM Ahmedabad has written to the ministry pointing out that while the government has mandated an 8 CGPA for direct entry candidates to pursue a PhD, its internal data on FPM shows that it has admitted scores of students even with a CGPA of 6, said the person. Half of its FPM pass outs came with engineering degrees and 60% of the candidates came with a CGPA less than 8. Many of these are even faculty at IIMA currently, the IIM has said.

The institute has also raised objections to the requirement of a two-year postgraduate diploma in management, saying a oneyear condensed version should also be considered acceptable, and to the minimum duration of three years fixed by the government for the PhD programme.