Govt vs IIMs: A story of deep distrust

livemint.com:

Mumbai: It is difficult to run the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) from Delhi," Prakash Javadekar, the former human resource development minister, told the Lok Sabha in 2017. The IIMs, India’s premier management schools, are centrally-funded. But for decades, many of them had been clamouring for more autonomy.

That year, their wish was partly fulfilled—Parliament passed the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Bill, effectively freeing the elite B-schools from government interference. Javadekar said that from then on, the IIMs would be “board-driven, with the chairperson and director selected by the board". But the truce between the government and the IIMs started unravelling sometime in 2018.

And today, the same government that had imposed faith in the autonomous running of the IIMs in 2017 now swung the other way. The beginnings of the fracture can be traced back to a case filed by Amitava Choudhury, a right to information (RTI) activist, and other people, challenging the appointment of Dheeraj Sharma, the director of IIM Rohtak, in the Punjab and Haryana High Court. The petitioners alleged that there were many discrepancies in the appointment of Sharma to the institute’s top job.

Sharma, they held, did not meet the eligibility criteria required for the job (more of this later). Over the next five years, the fracture worsened. The government became a party to the case and the legal dispute continues to this day.