Thursday, May 24, 2007

That 'autonomy' thing

ET has an edit today that lambasts the governments' reported attempt to enact an IIM Act along the lines of an IIT Act (See my post, IIM Bill). The edit remarks at one point:

In the name of safeguarding autonomy and excellence, they have often been non-transparent about the use of their existing corpus

I can't figure out what is meant here. The size of the corpus is no secret. The interest income on the corpus helps the IIMs augment their revenue flows. The HRD Ministry wants the corpus size to be limited to Rs 50 crore. The rest, it argues, must be spent on expansion of infrastructure. If the IIMs fall short of revenues, the HRD ministry will provide grants as required. The IIMs would rather like to have the cushion of interest income. I am not aware that there is any lack of transparency in respect of the corpus.

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