Friday, October 05, 2012

Indian B-Schools might fall short

Indian B-Schools are Facing an Acute Crisis of a Faculty Crunch and if Steps On War Footing are not Undertaken, Indian B-Schools might fall short of their Own Quality Benchmarks Themselves

When I teach “reverse innovation’, that is the idea I created. Therefore, I am going to teach it at a level of depth, which may not be possible for someone who reads my article and teaches from it” says Govindarajan. When Honourable Union Minister for HRD, Kapil Sibal, wrote the cover story in our sister publication The Sunday Indian this year, the dearth of faculty and the lack of focus on research were two of the key critical structural issues he brought out. And the issue is recognised not just at the high forums. When B&E stretched across India, educationists far and wide realised the issue. From professors like Deepa Shimpy (Professor at Symbiosis Centre for Distant Learning, Pune) to faculties like Prof. Krishnaswamy, Dean of Social Science for Higher Studies, Christ College, Bengaluru, the issue that top academicians shared with us was similar – the quantity and quality of faculty has gone down phenomenally since the coming up of many management institutions in India.

As per National Knowledge Commission, “The number of researchers in India was 112 per million inhabitants compared to 633 in China and 4,374 in the USA in 2002. The growth in the number of doctorates has only been a modest 20% in India during 1991-2001 compared to 85% in China during the same period.” And since it is mandatory in almost all top institutions in every field in India to hire only PhDs for the position of permanent faculty, the faculty crunch becomes inevitable. Secondly, the single biggest factor that B-schools in India do not have the requisite number of quality faculty is because of the fact that the investment in R&D in Indian institutes of higher learning is abysmally low and is thus, a deterrent to students going for PhDs and also for PhDs entering the teaching profession. In fact, as per a statistic, not even 1% of the MBAs go on to be doctorates in India. A May 2008 Assocham survey of 258 faculty members of B-schools revealed that 89% of the respondents were unable to state the country’s GDP growth rate in 2006-07, and less than 10% were aware of the subprime crisis in USA.

However, with the Foreign Universities Bill to be tabled in the parliament soon, the faculty crunch problem could be tackled with an iron hand as the setting up of foreign university campuses in India will bring many more NRI and PIO professors from B-schools in the West to India. But it’s high time that B-schools realise that however strong one’s course contents might be, until and unless the deliverer (nee, the Professor) is competent, the message simply doesn’t get across. Institutions and most importantly the government has to tackle this issue right here, right now.


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
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