The Indian Institutes of Management Act, 2017 is the only Indian higher education statute in which the same government first wrote the executive almost entirely out of an institution’s governance and then, within six years, wrote it back in. The IIM Act 2017 did not merely adjust the relationship between the management institutes and the ministry that funds them. It abolished that relationship in its older form, made each institute a body corporate governed by a board that appointed its own chairperson and its own director, and gave the institutes a power they had sought for half a century, the power to grant degrees. The amendment of 2023 then reversed the centre of that design without touching a single provision about teaching, admissions or research. It moved the appointment of the chairperson, the approval of the director’s appointment and removal, the power of inquiry and the power to dissolve the board itself into the hands of a Visitor, the President of India acting on the advice of the government of the day. Anyone who wants to understand how institutional autonomy in India is actually conferred and withdrawn should read these two statutes together, because between them they isolate the mechanism. Autonomy did not move when the objects clause changed, or when the declaration of national importance was made, or when the degree power was granted. It moved when four appointment clauses changed.

That is the argument of this article, and it is a testable one, because the two texts are short enough to compare provision by provision. The article therefore does three things. It sets out what the institutes were before Parliament legislated, as registered societies awarding diplomas under the eye of a ministry that appointed their directors and chairpersons. It then reads the 2017 Act as it was enacted, in the order of its operative provisions, and the amendment of 2023 in the same way, so that the reader can see precisely which words moved. Finally it states the argument about those words at full strength on both sides, because the government’s case, that publicly funded bodies cannot be accountable to nobody, is a serious one, and the counter-case, that appointment power over an institution’s head is the principal lever over everything the institution does, is equally serious. The verdict offered at the end is the one the texts themselves support.

What the institutes were before Parliament legislated

The Indian Institutes of Management were not created by statute. The two founded in 1961, at Calcutta and at Ahmedabad, were registered as societies, and every institute that followed adopted the same legal form, registering under the Societies Registration Act, 1860 or under the corresponding state legislation named in the Schedule to the later Act. A registered society is a private law creature. It is governed by its memorandum of association and its rules, it holds its property through its governing body, and it exists in law as an association of persons rather than as an institution of the state. For institutions built with public money, on public land, to a public purpose, that form produced a permanent ambiguity. The institutes behaved as autonomous academic bodies and were led by directors of considerable independence of mind, yet the ministry that funded them retained, through the society documents and through convention, the power to appoint the director, the chairperson and the members of the board of governors of each institute. Contemporary reporting of the 2017 Bill stated the position plainly: before the Act, the education ministry held the power to appoint IIM directors, chairpersons and board members.

The choice of the society form in 1961 was itself deliberate, and understanding it prevents a common misreading of the later history, in which the society decades figure as a primitive stage awaiting statutory maturity. The founders of the first institutes, and the foreign collaborators who advised them, the Harvard Business School at Ahmedabad and the Sloan School at Calcutta, with the Ford Foundation supporting both ventures, wanted institutions that stood outside the Indian university system of the day, with its affiliations, its prescribed syllabuses and its examination bureaucracy. A society answerable to its own governing body could hire faculty on contract, design a curriculum around the case method, run executive programmes for paying clients and set its own admissions test, all without seeking a university’s syndicate or a government’s education department. For four decades the form delivered exactly what it promised. The institutes’ grievance against it was never that it failed; it was that it left the two things the institutes could not give themselves, degrees for their students and security for their governance, in other hands. The degree required a statute. The security, in the form of freedom from ministerial appointment, required the same statute to say a harder thing, and between 1961 and 2017 the institutes enjoyed in practice, at the hands of directors and boards prepared to defend it, a large measure of the autonomy they did not yet possess in law.

The society form carried a second and more concrete disability, which fell not on the institutes but on their students. A society cannot grant a degree. Under the scheme of the University Grants Commission Act, 1956, the right to confer degrees belongs to universities and to institutions that Parliament has empowered for the purpose, and a body outside that scheme, however eminent, awards what the law treats as its own certificates. The institutes accordingly awarded a Post Graduate Diploma in Management on their two-year programme and a fellowship on their doctoral programme. Within Indian industry the diploma carried the full weight of the institute’s brand, and employers treated it as the equal of any degree in the country. Outside that charmed circle, in foreign universities assessing an application for doctoral study and in credential evaluation abroad, a diploma was a document that required explanation, and generations of graduates supplied the explanation one file at a time.

How were the IIMs run before Parliament gave them a statute?

They ran as registered societies under memoranda of association, with governing boards whose chairpersons and members, and directors, were appointed by the central ministry that funded them. The arrangement gave the institutes wide operational freedom in practice while reserving every senior appointment to the government, and it denied them the legal power to grant degrees.

The system’s scale by the time Parliament acted is part of the story. From the founding pair of 1961 the family grew by deliberate waves: Bangalore and Lucknow in the following decades, Kozhikode and Indore in the 1990s, Shillong thereafter, a group of six announced in 2015 at Nagpur, Visakhapatnam, Amritsar, Bodh Gaya, Sambalpur and Sirmaur, and Jammu in 2016, making the twenty institutes the Schedule would list. Admission to the flagship programmes ran through the Common Admission Test, conducted by the institutes themselves, and the older institutes had accumulated alumni networks, endowments in formation and international standing that made them, in the language of the day, too successful to be run as departmental outposts and too publicly owned to be left as private clubs. The younger institutes stood in a different position, occupying campuses still under construction and dependent on central grants for nearly every rupee of capital expenditure, a difference inside the family that would matter when the governance question returned in 2022 and 2023.

The governance question was examined officially long before it was answered legislatively. The committee chaired by R. C. Bhargava, appointed to review the functioning and governance of the institutes, reported in 2008 and recommended a restructuring that gave the institutes greater room while tightening the accountability of their boards, and its treatment of appointments, that the criteria for choosing directors should be broad-based and should rule out political factors, was still being invoked in litigation a decade and a half later. The recommendation went largely unimplemented. What followed instead was a series of frictions between the institutes and the ministry, over fees, over admissions policy and over appointments, conducted through the informal instruments of the society regime: a direction here, a delayed approval there, a nominee’s vote on a board. The regime’s defenders could point to the institutes’ unmistakable success under it. Its critics could answer that success had been achieved by particular directors defending particular decisions, and that a system which depends on the temperament of the office-holders on both sides is not a settlement at all.

The first attempt at a statute showed how contested the settlement would be. A draft bill prepared in the ministry in 2015 proposed to gather the institutes under a statute that, as the Indian Express recorded in its editorial of 10 August 2023, sought sweeping powers over their management, including making the President the Visitor of the institutes and giving the ministry a decisive hand in board appointments. Contemporary reporting of the 2015 draft described a Visitor with power to review the work of the institutes, top appointments made by the President on the government’s advice rather than by the boards, and a ministry presence woven through the governing structure. The institutes and their alumni objected in strong terms, in public letters and in the press, arguing that the institutes’ excellence had been built by faculty and directors left free to run them and that a statute written in the vocabulary of rules and regulations would govern them in that spirit. The Prime Minister’s Office overruled the design, and the draft was withdrawn and reworked. When a fresh draft emerged in 2016 under a new minister, Prakash Javadekar, the Visitor had disappeared from it, the draft’s references to presidential review of the institutes had been dropped, and the appointment of directors and chairpersons had been handed to the boards, with the fee structure left to the institutes as well. That drafting history matters for everything that follows, because it establishes that the Visitor model was not an idea the government discovered in 2023. It was the government’s own first preference in 2015, considered and set aside in 2016, enacted against in 2017, and restored in 2023. The argument of 2023 had already been had once, inside the same government, and on that first occasion the autonomy side of it had won.

The IIM Act 2017 and the settlement it enacted

The Indian Institutes of Management Bill, 2017 was approved by the Union Cabinet on 24 January 2017 and introduced in the Lok Sabha on 9 February 2017 by Prakash Javadekar, the Minister of Human Resource Development. The Lok Sabha passed it on 28 July 2017 and the Rajya Sabha on 19 December 2017. It received the assent of the President on 31 December 2017 and was published in the Gazette the same day as Act 33 of 2017. It came into force on 31 January 2018, by notification S.O. 149(E) dated 11 January 2018. The passage was a rare moment of cross-party warmth in a legislature not given to it. Javadekar told the Lok Sabha that the bill was a historical one which would bring a new era in management education, that its aim was to remove the government’s interference in the institutes, and that the government would have only one representative on each board so that the institutes could take decisions independently. Press reports of the debate recorded the Congress member Shashi Tharoor praising the minister for a bill that restricted the government’s own role. The minister was equally clear about what the government retained: the institutes ran on taxpayers’ money, and their financial transactions would remain subject to audit by the Comptroller and Auditor-General.

Section 2 of the Act declares each institute mentioned in the Schedule to be an institution of national importance. The declaration is the provision around which the Act is organised and the one its long title announces, but its legal content is easily overstated. It confers status, and with it a claim on public support and a place in the first rank of Indian institutions; it does not itself grant or withhold any power. The powers are in the sections that follow, and the site of the declaration in the constitutional scheme, a Parliament legislating for institutions it treats as nationally significant within a subject, education, that sits in the Concurrent List, is examined in the series’ account of education and the Concurrent List. Section 4 then performs the quiet revolution. On the commencement of the Act, every existing institute became a body corporate by the name in the Schedule, with perpetual succession and a common seal, able to hold property, to contract and to sue and be sued in its own name. Section 5 transferred the property, rights, debts and liabilities of each society to the corresponding institute, carried every employee across on the same tenure, remuneration and terms, migrated every student to the same level of the same course, and continued every pending legal proceeding against the new body. The societies were not wound up by litigation or negotiation. They were translated, by a deeming provision, into statutory corporations, and the institutes woke on 31 January 2018 with a legal personality they had never possessed.

The human content of Section 5 is worth separating out, because a change of legal form is experienced by people as continuity or disruption, and the drafters chose continuity at every point where a choice existed. The professor who had been appointed by a society found herself, on commencement, an employee of the body corporate on the same tenure, the same remuneration and the same terms and conditions, with no fresh appointment, no break in service and no renegotiation; the non-teaching staff crossed on the identical protection. The student in the middle of the two-year programme continued at the same level of the same course and was deemed, by the closing words of the section, to have been admitted to the institute under the Act itself, a deeming that carried a consequence the student may not have noticed until convocation: the credential at the end of the course would be the institute’s own degree rather than its diploma, since the institute the student stood deemed to attend was a degree-granting body. The contractor with a claim, the litigant with a pending suit, the bank with a charge, all found their proceedings and obligations continuing against the institute as though the institute had been a party from the beginning. Even the society’s membership interest was extinguished by construction rather than by winding up: on commencement each existing institute was deemed to be an institute established under the Act, and the Registrar of Societies had nothing further to register. The care of this drafting is the background against which the amendment of 2023 made one deliberate exception. When the amendment adjusted Section 5 for the Mumbai incorporation, it rewrote the staff-continuity clause to exclude the Director from its first words and then restored the Director’s continuity by an express proviso, a drafting detour whose only function is to mark the Director’s tenure as a special case in the amended scheme: every other employee of an incorporated institute crosses automatically, while the chief executive’s position is separately provided for, as befits an office whose appointment, approval and termination the amendment had just placed in other hands.

The debate on the Bill is worth a paragraph of its own because of how completely the positions of 2023 invert it. The government’s anxieties in 2017 ran in the opposite direction: members pressed the minister on whether autonomy would dilute reservation, weaken financial discipline or let fees escape public control, and the answers given from the Treasury benches were that reservation stood protected by the Act’s own text, that the Comptroller and Auditor-General would audit the institutes because they ran on taxpayers’ money, and that the institutes would not require to come to the government for permissions and clearances. Javadekar’s formulation, reported from the Lok Sabha debate, was that it was not an ideal situation to run the institutes from Delhi, and that the government would have only one representative on each board so that the institutes could decide independently. No speaker of consequence in either House defended a Visitor, a power of prior approval or a power of dissolution, for the sufficient reason that the Bill contained none; the ministry’s 2015 draft, which had contained the first two, had been withdrawn the year before the Bill was introduced.

The Act’s scope device deserves notice, because it distributes power between Parliament and the executive in a way the later amendments would exploit in one direction and respect in the other. The Act governs no institute in the abstract; it governs the institutes mentioned in its Schedule, each entry recording the state, the existing society and the name of the institute it becomes. The consequence is that the family’s membership is a legislative question. No notification can add an institute, and no institute can be removed, except by an Act of Parliament amending the Schedule, which is why both extensions of the family, Mumbai in 2023 and Guwahati in 2025, arrived as amendment Acts with their own assent and commencement. Within the family so defined, by contrast, the 2023 settlement made governance substantially an executive question, settled through approvals, nominations and rules. The asymmetry is instructive: it remains harder, in formal terms, to create an institute than to dissolve its board, and a reader tracing where Indian public law locates the solemn and the routine will find the solemnity attached to existence and the routine attached to control.

Section 6 states the objects of each institute: to educate leaders for the private, public and social sectors, to carry out research and consultancy, to provide management education of high quality, to sensitise that education to inclusive, equitable and sustainable national development, and to support programmes promoting social and gender equity. Section 9 adds two disciplines that shape the institutes’ finances to this day. Every institute is a not-for-profit legal entity, and no part of any surplus may be invested for any purpose other than the growth and development of the institute or research within it; and every institute is directed to strive to raise funds for self-sufficiency and sustainability. Section 8 requires the institutes to be open to all persons irrespective of sex, race, creed, caste or class, requires admission to be based on merit assessed through transparent and reasonable criteria disclosed in advance, and deems each institute a Central Educational Institution for the purposes of the Central Educational Institutions (Reservation in Admission) Act, 2006, so that the statutory reservation scheme applies to its admissions.

What kind of body the Act made: the statutory hybrid

Before the operative provisions, the Act’s classification choices deserve a section of their own, because an institute under the IIM Act is several legal things at once and its governance disputes cannot be understood without separating them. As a body corporate under Section 4 it is a legal person distinct from its members, its Board and the government, capable of owning the campus, employing the faculty and suing a defaulting contractor in its own name. As a not-for-profit entity under Section 9 it is forbidden the defining freedom of a company, the distribution or external investment of its surplus, which must be recycled into its own growth and research. As a Central Educational Institution for the purposes of the reservation statute, by the second proviso to Section 8(3), it sits inside the Union’s social justice framework for admissions, its seats distributed under the same constitutional scheme as the central universities. As a public authority under Section 33 it is subject to the transparency statute, obliged to answer citizens’ applications for information about its functioning. As an employer and a decision-maker exercising statutory powers it is amenable to the writ jurisdiction of the High Courts, as the Kerala High Court’s reasoning in the Kozhikode proceedings confirmed. And as a creature of the Schedule it exists because Parliament listed it, which means its existence, unlike a society’s, cannot be undone by its members or its ministry but only by another Act. The hybridity explains both sides of the autonomy debate. The institutes’ defenders emphasise the first and last features, personhood and statutory entrenchment, and describe bodies that the state created and then stood back from. The government’s defenders emphasise the middle features, public money, public functions, public law duties, and describe bodies that are the state for most legal purposes and cannot sensibly claim a private body’s freedom from the state’s own head. Both descriptions are accurate accounts of the same text, which is why the debate is never settled by citing the Act’s status provisions and is only ever settled, provisionally, by the appointment clauses.

Degrees, fees and the powers of an institute

Section 7 lists the powers and functions of every institute, and two of its clauses did more practical work than the declaration in Section 2. Clause (f) empowers each institute to grant degrees, diplomas and other academic distinctions or titles, and to institute and award fellowships, scholarships, prizes and medals. With that clause, the disability of the society years ended. The power is the institute’s own, exercisable through its Board under Section 11, and it exists because Parliament conferred it directly; under the University Grants Commission Act, 1956, degree-granting is a jealously guarded function, and an institution holds it either as a university or because a statute such as this one says it may. Clause (i) empowers the institute to determine, specify and receive payment of fees and other charges as it may deem fit, from students and from any other person or body, for instruction and for services including training, consultancy and advisory work. Read together, the two clauses locate the academic credential and the price of acquiring it inside the institute. The remaining clauses of Section 7 fill out the ordinary equipment of a teaching institution: admission by regulations, courses and examinations, infrastructure, the creation of posts other than the Director’s, the receipt of grants, gifts and internally generated funds, and the custody of those funds.

Two features of this allocation deserve emphasis because later argument so often misdescribes them. The first is that the degree power and the fee power were granted by the same section that granted everything else, as part of the ordinary equipment of a statutory teaching body, and neither was hedged with a requirement of prior government approval. An institute that wished to convert its postgraduate diploma into a degree needed no permission beyond its own Board’s decision and its own regulations. An institute that wished to raise its fees needed no clearance from the ministry. The second is that the Act separated the power to charge from the duty to account. The institutes’ money, including the fees they set themselves, went into a statutory Fund under Section 22, their accounts were audited by the Comptroller and Auditor-General under Section 23, and their annual reports were laid before Parliament under Section 28. The 2017 settlement was not a release from accountability. It was a decision about which accountability instruments to use: audit, publication and Parliamentary laying, applied after the fact, rather than prior approval of appointments and decisions, applied before it.

What could an IIM not do before it had a statute of its own?

It could not grant a degree, because a registered society holds no degree-conferring power under the University Grants Commission Act, 1956; it could not hold its property or sue in a statutory corporate name; and it could not choose its own director or chairperson, since appointments at that level rested with the central ministry under the society framework.

Precision requires one qualification to the picture of a government written out of the Act, because the 2017 text did retain several central levers, and the institutes’ critics in 2023 were entitled to point at the spaces they occupied and ask why approval of appointments was different in kind. The Board’s power under Section 11(2) to create posts and make appointments to them carried a proviso: the cadre, the pay scales, allowances and term of employment of such posts shall be such as may be determined by the Central Government. An institute’s power under Section 7 to deal with its property was qualified where the property had been obtained from government funds, and land provided free of cost by a state or the Centre could be disposed of only with the prior approval of the Central Government. Centres of management studies outside India could be set up only in accordance with guidelines laid down by the Central Government. The terms and conditions of the Director’s own service were a matter for the Central Government’s rules under Section 34, and the first regulations made by each Board had to be laid before Parliament under Section 37. These were not trivial reservations; pay structure and cadre are the skeleton of an institution’s staffing. But each of them operated on the framework within which the institute acted, not on the identity of the persons who acted for it. The distinction the framers drew, between the state setting the terms of service and the state choosing the servants, is the distinction the whole statute turns on, and it is the distinction the 2023 amendment crossed.

The degree power was exercised quickly, and its exercise is the clearest evidence of what the 2017 Act changed in the lives of people who never read it. At its fifty-fourth convocation on 17 March 2019, the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad awarded the Master of Business Administration degree for the first time, to the postgraduate batch of 2017 to 2019. The Indian Institute of Management Bangalore awarded degrees at its forty-fourth convocation in the same season, and Calcutta and other institutes followed. The fellow programme became a doctoral degree, as Javadekar had told Parliament it would. For the graduates concerned, the change was not cosmetic. A degree is the currency in which foreign universities and credential evaluators trade; a diploma, however prestigious its source, is a claim that has to be argued. The Act converted an argument into a document.

The same Section 7 warrants the institutes’ commercial academic life, and its breadth explains why the autonomy settlement mattered to institutional finances and not only to academic pride. Section 7 empowers an institute to provide instruction and training, to undertake consultancy, research, development and other activities on payment of fees or charges, and to provide distance education and collaborate with institutions in India and abroad. An institute that can set its fees under Section 11(2)(m), charge for executive education and consultancy under Section 7, and retain the surplus under the not-for-profit discipline of Section 9 for its own growth is an institution with the legal makings of financial independence, and the older institutes used precisely this combination to build the revenue base on which their practical autonomy rested. The statutory point connects the education provisions to the governance provisions of the dispute. Financial self-reliance was the material foundation on which the 2017 Board settlement was expected to stand: a board that controls its institution’s income can plausibly be left to appoint its institution’s officers, while a board dependent on annual grants invites the funder’s hand on its appointments. The uneven distribution of that foundation across the family, oldest institutes rich in fee and executive income and newest dependent on capital grants, is the quiet structural fact beneath the politics of 2022 and 2023, and no reading of the amendment is complete without it.

The Board of Governors as the institute’s constitution

Every constitution has a provision that does the real work, and in the IIM Act that provision is Section 10. Section 10(1) declares that the Board of Governors of each institute shall be the principal executive body of that institute. Section 11(1) makes the Board responsible for the general superintendence, direction and control of the affairs of the institute, with power to frame, amend, modify or rescind the regulations governing those affairs. Section 10(2) then composes the Board, and it is the composition, more than any declaration, that made the 2017 Act what its admirers and its critics both said it was. Company law reaches its results by the same route, prescribing in detail who must sit in the boardroom and trusting the room to govern; the framers of the IIM Act used the identical instrument, and what they prescribed was a room the government barely entered.

Who sat on an IIM Board of Governors under the 2017 design?

The Board ran to nineteen places at most: a Chairperson, one nominee each of the Central and the State Government, four eminent persons nominated by the Board, two faculty members, up to five co-opted alumni or society members, members drawn from those categories for Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe and women representation, and the Director ex officio.

The enumeration repays slow reading. The Chairperson was to be appointed by the Board itself, from among eminent persons distinguished in industry, education, science, technology, management or public administration. One member was a nominee of the Central Government, being the official having charge of management education or a representative. One member was a nominee of the state government within whose territory the institute sits. Four eminent persons, of whom at least one was to be a woman, distinguished in education, industry, commerce, social service or public administration, were to be nominated by the Board. Two members of the faculty were to be nominated by the Chairperson in the manner laid down by the Board’s regulations. One person from the Scheduled Castes or the Scheduled Tribes was to be nominated by the Board from among the members in the nominated categories, and three women members were likewise to be nominated by the Board from among those categories. Up to five persons were to be co-opted by the Board from the alumni or the members of the society of the existing institute who had distinguished themselves in the field of management, not more than one of them from the society. The Director sat ex officio. Contemporary summaries of the Act put the arithmetic plainly: of a board of up to nineteen, seventeen places were filled through the Board’s own processes of appointment, nomination and co-option, and two were filled by governments. One of those two was the state’s. The Union government, which funded the institutes, which had created them and which answered for them in Parliament, held a single seat, and the Act gave it no veto, no power of direction and no right of prior approval over anything the Board decided.

Section 12 gave the Chairperson and the other non-officio members a term of four years, with eligibility for a second term and a bar on more than two consecutive terms, and required the Board to meet at least once in every three months. The powers catalogued in Section 11(2) were comprehensive: policy decisions, approval of the budget and of the development plan, the establishment of departments and programmes, the grant of degrees and honorary degrees, the creation of posts and appointments to them, the determination of fees by regulations, the institution of fellowships and scholarships, and the framing of regulations on everything from staff conditions to financial accountability. Two of those powers connected the Board to the Director in ways that matter for the later story. Under Section 11(4), the Board was required to conduct an annual review of the performance of the Director, in the context of the achievement of the institute’s objects. Under Section 11(5), the Board was required, through an independent agency or group of experts, to evaluate and review the performance of the institute, including its faculty, within three years of incorporation and at least once every three years thereafter, to place the report in the public domain, and under Section 11(7) to submit it to the Central Government with an action taken report. And Section 11(9), a single sentence easily missed, provided that the Board, in the exercise of its powers and the discharge of its functions, shall be accountable to the Central Government. The accountability was real but it was accountability of a particular kind: answerability after the fact, to audit, to evaluation, to publication and to Parliament, with no corresponding power in the government to appoint, to direct or to remove.

The academic side of the house was kept institutionally separate. Section 14 constitutes an Academic Council for each institute as its principal academic body, chaired by the Director and composed of the deans, the chairs of areas and programmes, the full-time professors and other faculty in numbers the Board determines, together with invited members eminent in industry, finance, management, public administration and academics. Section 15 assigns to the Academic Council the criteria and process for admissions, the academic content of programmes and modifications to it, the academic calendar, the guidelines for the conduct of examinations, and the recommendation of the grant of degrees. Section 36 gives the Academic Council the power to make Ordinances on admissions, courses of study, examinations and discipline, subject to the Board’s power to modify or cancel them. Nothing in the 2023 amendment touched Sections 14, 15 or 36. The reader should hold that fact in reserve; a great deal of the later argument turns on it.

The internal machinery around the Board completed the design. Section 18 lets the Board designate officers as custodians of the institute’s records, common seal, funds and property. Section 19 preserves a small bridge to the founding generation, allowing the members of two of the original societies named in the Schedule to be engaged by the corresponding Boards for advisory assistance. Section 20 empowers the Board to constitute committees and other authorities by regulations, and ad hoc committees as it deems fit. Section 31 protects the validity of acts done despite vacancies, defects in constitution or irregularities of procedure not affecting the merits. Section 35 vests the regulation-making power in the Board, over everything from admissions and fees to staff qualifications and financial accountability, subject to the Act and the Central Government’s rules. The picture is of an institution with a complete internal legal order: a legislature in the Board’s regulations, an academic senate in the Council, an executive in the Director, and audit from outside by the constitutional auditor. Into that order the society-era ministry nominee system had no remaining entry point, which was the intention.

The Director under the 2017 design

Section 16 made the Director the chief executive officer of the institute, responsible for implementing the decisions of the Board, and then did the thing no Indian central institution statute had done before: it left the choice of that officer entirely to the Board. As enacted, Section 16(2) provided that the Director shall be appointed by the Board, on such terms and conditions of service as may be prescribed. Section 16(3) required the appointment to be made out of a panel of names recommended by a search-cum-selection committee constituted by the Board, consisting of the Chairperson of the Board, who chaired it, and three members chosen from among eminent administrators, industrialists and educationists. Section 16(5) fixed the term at five years from the date of entering office, except on resignation or removal. Section 16(8) required the Board to begin the appointment process nine months before an anticipated vacancy, and Section 16(9) empowered the Board, where the post fell vacant for any reason, to appoint the senior-most willing member of the faculty as Director in charge until a regular appointment was made. At no point in this machinery did the Central Government appear: not as approver, not as nominee, not as the authority prescribing the selection procedure, which the Board’s own committee structure governed subject to the rules on terms of service.

Removal was the Board’s as well, and it was carefully hedged in the Director’s favour. Section 16(7) empowered the Board to remove a Director who had been adjudged an insolvent, who had been convicted of an offence which in the Board’s opinion involved moral turpitude, who had become physically or mentally incapable of acting, who had acquired a financial or other interest likely to affect his functions prejudicially, or who had so abused his position or so conducted himself as to render his continuance in office prejudicial to the public interest. The proviso required that no Director be removed except by an order of the Board made after an enquiry instituted by it, in which the Director had been informed of the charges and given a reasonable opportunity of being heard. Section 16(4) added the managerial route: the Board could lay down criteria for the Director’s exercise of his powers, evaluate compliance annually, and, after giving the Director an opportunity of being heard, initiate removal action under Section 16(7) where the criteria had not been followed.

The Director’s office was dressed with two further features that show how completely the framers trusted the Board’s supervision to do the work of control. Under Section 11(2), the Board could pay the Director variable pay on the basis of performance objectives specified by regulations, a private-sector instrument transplanted into a public statute, and under Section 26 the Director’s annual report to the Board had to disclose, among much else, the names of the five officers and employees of the institute who received the highest remuneration in the year and whether any of them was a relative of a member of the Board or the Academic Council. The eligibility of the office was set not by the Act but by the rules made under it, which described the Director, in the form they took before the 2023 changes, as a distinguished academic with a PhD or equivalent. A system that wanted a tame director had every incentive to write the eligibility narrowly and the approval externally; the 2017 framers did neither, leaving the pool wide and the choice internal, and relying on the annual review, the published accounts and the triennial evaluation to discipline the choice after it was made.

The five removal grounds repay the close reading the amendment later gave them. Four are objective in character: insolvency, conviction for an offence involving moral turpitude in the Board’s opinion, physical or mental incapacity, and a conflicting financial interest. The fifth is open-textured: the Director who has so abused his position or so conducted himself as to render his continuance in office prejudicial to the public interest. Ground five is where a determined Board and a determined Director would fight, and the framers hedged it with the enquiry proviso, which converts the Board’s opinion into a conclusion that must survive a charge-sheet, a hearing and a reasoned order. The Section 16(4) route is softer in form and harder in effect: criteria set by the Board, compliance evaluated annually, and on a finding of non-compliance, after a hearing, the initiation of removal under Section 16(7). Between them, the two provisions gave the 2017 Board both a disciplinary code and a performance-management system for its chief executive, and the absence of any external confirmation stage was the more remarkable because the Act’s framers were legislating for institutions in which the government was the principal funder. When the amendment inserted the Visitor’s prior approval into Section 16(7) and a freestanding termination power into Section 16(10), it did not create the removal machinery. It nationalised the machinery’s final step, and added a second machine beside it whose operating rules the government would write itself.

The Board also held an inquiry power over the institute itself, in the original Section 17. Where an institute had not been functioning in accordance with the provisions and objectives of the Act, the Board might initiate an inquiry as it deemed proper, conducted by a retired judge of a High Court. On the findings of that inquiry the Board could remove the Director or take any other action it deemed fit, and the institute was bound to comply with its directions within a reasonable time. The architecture, taken as a whole, located the entire disciplinary constitution of the institute inside the institute: the Board appointed, the Board evaluated, the Board inquired, and the Board removed. The government’s instruments were the single Board seat, the audit, the published evaluation, the annual report laid before Parliament, and the power under Section 32 to call for returns and information for the purpose of reporting to Parliament or making policy. Defenders of the design called this the first honest alignment of responsibility with authority in Indian public higher education. Its critics, whose case is set out in full below, called it a closed loop: a board that chose its own members, its own chair and its own director, and then judged all three.

The faculty dimension: autonomy as it is experienced inside

Statutes distribute power among offices, but autonomy in a teaching institution is experienced by the faculty, and the 2017 Act’s treatment of the professoriate explains why its defence, when the amendment came, was led as much by academic sentiment as by administrators. The faculty enter the Act at three points. Two of the Board’s places belong to members of the faculty, nominated by the Chairperson in the manner the Board’s regulations lay down, so the professoriate sat inside the body that appointed the Director and set the fees. The Academic Council, which controls admissions criteria and academic content, is a body of the faculty in its working majority, chaired by the Director and composed of deans, programme chairs and the full-time professors, so the curriculum was, in law, the faculty’s own act and not a management instruction. And the creation of academic posts, and appointments to them, belonged to the institute under Sections 7 and 11, subject to the centrally determined cadre and pay framework noted earlier. A professor at an institute under the 2017 Act therefore worked inside a complete internal constitution: hired by the institute, governed academically by a council of peers, represented on the board that chose the director, and protected in the content of teaching by the location of Section 15. The alumni letter-writers of 2015, arguing against the control-oriented draft, had made the faculty the centre of their case, counting the draft’s few mentions of faculty against its thickets of rules and regulations; the enacted Act answered that case by building the faculty into every tier. The 2023 amendment changed none of the faculty provisions. What it changed was the provenance of the two offices, the Chairperson who nominates the faculty’s Board members and the Director who chairs their Academic Council, through which all academic self-government is mediated. The faculty dimension is thus the human form of the article’s thesis: nothing in the classroom provisions moved, and everything that frames the classroom did.

Money, audit and the accountability the 2017 Act already contained

Because the controversy of 2023 was conducted in the vocabulary of accountability, the financial chapters of the 2017 Act deserve a careful summary. They are not the chapters of a statute that set its institutions free of the state. Chapter IV of the Act provides that the Central Government may pay each institute such sums as Parliament appropriates for the purpose. Section 22 creates the Fund of each institute, into which flow government money, fees, grants, gifts, donations and earnings from intellectual property and consultancy. Section 23 requires accounts to be maintained in the form the Central Government specifies by notification in consultation with the Comptroller and Auditor-General, and requires the accounts of every institute to be audited by the Comptroller and Auditor-General, whose certified accounts and audit report are forwarded annually to the Central Government and laid before each House of Parliament. Section 25 requires the Board to appoint auditors, including an internal auditor, each year and to constitute an Audit Committee. Section 26 requires the Director’s annual report, covering the state of affairs of the institute, appointments, performance indicators and the names of the five highest-paid officers and employees, to be attached to the accounts, and Section 27 requires the statement of accounts, once approved by the Board, to be published on the institute’s website. Section 28 requires an annual report, prepared under the Board’s directions and including an outcome-based assessment of the institute’s research, to be published on the website and submitted to the Central Government for laying before both Houses of Parliament. Section 33 applies the Right to Information Act, 2005 to each institute as if it were a public authority.

The finance model inside these provisions is the quiet half of the autonomy settlement, and it divided the family. Section 22(3) requires each institute to create a corpus fund for its long-term sustainability, credited with such percentage of its net income, and such donations made specifically towards it, as the Central Government may notify in accordance with the Income-tax Act, and permits the Board to create endowment funds for specific purposes. Section 9(2) directs every institute to strive for self-sufficiency. For the older institutes the striving was largely accomplished fact: fee income from the two-year programme, executive education revenue and consultancy earnings under Section 7 covered their running costs, philanthropic endowments began to be built in earnest, and the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad’s launch of a Rs 100 crore endowment fund in 2020 was reported as the first of its scale in the system. For the institutes founded in 2015 and 2016 the position was the reverse: central grants carried the capital plan, fee income was still maturing, and the corpus was an aspiration. The financial gradient inside the family maps closely onto the political gradient that appeared in 2022, when the directors who assented to the Visitor package were those of the newer institutes. Dependence does not determine opinion, but a statute that distributes autonomy uniformly across institutions of very unequal financial independence will be experienced unequally, and the 2017 Act’s uniform text concealed a divided constituency for its own defence.

An honest reader has to hold two descriptions of this scheme at once, because both are true. In one description, the institutes after 2018 were among the most transparently accountable public bodies in Indian higher education: audited by the constitutional auditor, reported to Parliament annually, evaluated externally every three years with the report in the public domain, subject to the transparency statute, and governed by a board formally accountable to the Central Government under Section 11(9). In the other description, every one of those instruments is retrospective and none of them is a lever. An audit reports on money after it is spent. An evaluation reports on performance after it has occurred. Parliament can debate an annual report, but the debate changes no appointment and reverses no decision. A government that wanted to influence what an institute did, rather than to learn afterwards what it had done, found in the 2017 Act no instrument with which to do it, and a government that believed an institute was being badly governed found no lawful route between ignoring the position and amending the statute. That gap, between accountability as answerability and accountability as control, is the space in which the amendment of 2023 was made.

The gap also explains the most effective rhetorical move available to the amendment’s defenders, which was to legislate in the 2017 Act’s own vocabulary. Because the framers of 2017 had themselves written audit, evaluation, publication and accountability to the Central Government into the statute, the framers of 2023 could present every new clause as the completion of an unfinished intention rather than its reversal: the Visitor’s inquiry as the enforcement arm the triennial evaluation had always lacked, the prior approval as the answerability of Section 11(9) given a mechanism, the direction power as the consequence that a report to the Central Government had always implied. The move is visible in the minister’s own framing during the August 2023 debates, where the Bill was said to ensure management accountability while academic accountability remained with the institutes, a distinction that borrows the 2017 Act’s own separation between the academic provisions and the governance provisions and recruits it for the opposite settlement. Rhetoric of this kind matters to the historian because it determines how a reversal is remembered: the institutes’ defenders must argue not that 2023 contradicted the words of 2017, for in large part it built on them, but that it contradicted the distribution of power the words of 2017 had enacted, which is a subtler and harder argument, and the one this article has tried to state in its strongest form on both sides.

The Coordination Forum

Chapter V of the Act creates the one body that stands above the individual institutes. Section 29 establishes a Coordination Forum for all the institutes, and Section 30 assigns it functions that are deliberately deliberative: to facilitate the sharing of experiences, ideas and concerns with a view to enhancing the performance of all institutes; to recommend to the Central Government the institution of scholarships, including for students of the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes and other socially and educationally backward classes; to deliberate on matters of common interest referred to it by any institute; to promote coordination and cooperation in the working of the institutes; to review the achievement of policy objectives; and to perform such other functions as the Central Government refers to it. The Forum reports to the Central Government on those functions and must meet at least once in a calendar year.

What does the Coordination Forum actually do?

Less than its name suggests. It is a deliberative and recommendatory body, not a governing one: it shares experience across the institutes, deliberates on matters of common interest, reviews the achievement of policy objectives and recommends scholarships to the Central Government, meeting at least once a year. It commands no institute and overrules no Board.

The Forum’s design contrasted pointedly with the coordinating machinery of the technology institutes, where a statutory Council chaired by the minister advises on admissions, standards and fees across the system and stands inside the appointment chain for chairmen and directors. The management institutes’ Forum was given no place in any appointment chain, no advisory jurisdiction over fees or admissions, and no power to bind a single Board; its strongest instrument was a report to the Central Government on its own deliberative functions. The contrast was deliberate. The 2017 Act recorded a choice the institutes had defended through every drafting round since the 2015 bill: coordination without command, a forum for the family that could speak to the government but not for the institutes against their will, and could not grow, by any provision in the Act, into a governing tier above the Boards.

As originally constituted, the Forum expressed the same philosophy as the rest of the Act. Its Chairperson was an eminent person selected through a search-cum-selection committee constituted by the Forum itself. Its members included the Secretary in charge of management education in the Central Government and two state secretaries for management education serving by rotation, the Directors of all the institutes ex officio, five persons of eminence in academia or public service, of whom at least one was to be a woman, selected by a sub-committee of the Forum, and the Chairpersons of four institutes, serving by rotation for two years and nominated by the Forum’s Chairperson. The Director of the host institute, the institute at which the meeting took place, acted as Member Secretary. The Forum could advise, recommend and review. It could not appoint anyone to anything in any institute, direct any Board, or spend any money. It was a table, not a tier of government. Whether that was a defect or a virtue depended on whether the reader believed twenty autonomous institutes needed a coordinating authority with teeth. Parliament in 2017 decided they did not.

The settlement at work, and the frictions it produced

The years between the commencement of the Act in January 2018 and the amendment in August 2023 supply the evidence base for both sides of the later argument, and the article records the principal episodes without arranging them into a verdict they will not bear. The degree power, as shown, was exercised within fourteen months and transformed the credential of every graduating student. The fee power was exercised too, in the ordinary way, by Boards setting fees through regulations, and fees at the older institutes climbed to levels that members of Parliament would later cite in the amendment debate as evidence that autonomy had a social cost. The Board’s appointment power was exercised in the selection of directors and chairpersons across the system without ministerial approval, which was precisely what the Act intended.

The frictions came at the edges, where the Act’s text met the ministry’s habits. The sharpest concerned nomenclature. Several institutes, exercising the degree power, styled the award on their one-year executive programme a Master of Business Administration. The ministry objected, in 2018 and again thereafter, that the award of a master’s degree for a programme of one year offended the norms of the University Grants Commission, and the Law Ministry advised that although the Act empowered the institutes to grant degrees, it did not define a degree or empower the Boards to make regulations settling what counted as one. The institutes proceeded with their one-year degrees regardless, treating the objection as exactly the species of prior control the Act had abolished. In 2021, the ministry sought a review of a doctoral thesis at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad and the institute declined, an episode the Indian Express editorial of 10 August 2023 recalled as evidence of a relationship in which the ministry continued to reach for instruments of supervision that the statute had taken away, and the institute continued to refuse them. In the same period, at the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, a public dispute between the Board and the Director ended with the Director resigning before her term expired, an episode equally available to both sides of the argument: to the ministry’s defenders, as evidence that a self-governing board could fall into a governance failure with no external resolver; to the institutes’ defenders, as evidence that the Board system, left alone, had in fact resolved the crisis through its own processes.

One practical consequence of the settlement deserves recording because administrators across the system felt it in their files. The accountability the Act chose was documentary: accounts published on the institute’s website after Board approval, annual reports laid before Parliament, triennial evaluations placed in the public domain. A researcher, a journalist or a rival institute comparing the system can work from those publications directly, and the statements of account and outcome assessments the institutes publish can be opened and read as Excel, Word or PowerPoint files in the browser without specialised software, which is the sense in which the 2017 design made the institutes legible to the public while keeping them ungoverned by the ministry. Legibility, the framers wagered, was the accountability a free institution owed; direction was the accountability of a subordinate one.

Two lessons are safe. The first is that the 2017 Act did not end the contest between the institutes and the ministry; it changed the contest’s legal terrain, so that the ministry had to argue from norms, conventions and public pressure rather than from appointment letters. The second is that no published finding of governance failure at any institute, no committee report, no audit scandal and no judicial determination preceded the amendment of 2023. The government of the day was, of course, entitled to change its mind about the design on grounds of general policy, and said that was what it was doing. But the absence of an evidentiary trigger is a fact about the amendment’s origins that the record supports, and the opposition’s case rested heavily on it.

The road back: how the 2023 amendment was made

The restoration of the Visitor began, as in 2015, inside the ministry, and its approach was visible a year before the Bill. In 2022 the ministry told the institutes that it was working out a new procedure for the formation of the search-cum-selection committees involved in the appointment of chairpersons, and asked the Boards to extend the tenures of their sitting chairpersons until the procedure was finalised, a request reported by Moneycontrol that reads, in retrospect, as the first public sign that the chairperson question had been reopened at the centre. The Indian Express reported that at a meeting on 14 September 2022, attended by the directors of the newer institutes, assent was taken to a package of amendments that included making the President the Visitor of the institutes with the power to appoint the Chairperson of the Board of Governors; the directors of Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Calcutta, Indore, Lucknow and Kozhikode, the six oldest institutes, were not at the meeting. A director who attended told the newspaper that the government had principally wanted the opinion of the newer institutes. The Bill that emerged was introduced in the Lok Sabha on 28 July 2023 by Dharmendra Pradhan, the Minister of Education, the ministry itself having been renamed from Human Resource Development to Education in 2020. It was introduced, and the Lok Sabha passed it on 4 August 2023, in a House disrupted by opposition protest over the violence in Manipur, and it was passed by voice vote. The Rajya Sabha passed it on 8 August 2023, also by voice vote, and it received the assent of the President on 11 August 2023 as Act 23 of 2023, coming into force on 16 August 2023. The circumstances of passage are recorded here because the series records them: a statute that rearranged the governance of twenty-one institutions completed its passage through both Houses in eleven days, in a disrupted session, without a committee stage and without a division.

Piloting the Bill in the Lok Sabha, Pradhan made the government’s case in terms that supply the foundation of one side of the argument recorded in this article. The government, he said, had no intention of taking away the academic accountability of the institutes; the Bill would ensure their management accountability, and the Centre had spent over Rs 6,000 crore in setting up the institutes. The President was already the Visitor of the Indian Institutes of Technology and the National Institutes of Technology, he observed, and no questions were raised about the academic autonomy of those institutes. The opposition’s response was immediate and came principally from the Congress. Jairam Ramesh, the party’s general secretary and a member of the Rajya Sabha, said on 29 July 2023 that the institutes had been given greater autonomy in 2017 in legislation that had wide support in Parliament, that six years later the government was undoing what it itself had introduced, and that clearly autonomy was unwelcome for this government; the Prime Minister’s Office, he added, wanted to maintain the tightest possible control and to ensure ideological purity, setting aside considerations of quality, freedom of thought and flexibility in the administration of programmes. The Indian Express, in its editorial of 10 August 2023, described the amendment as giving the Visitor a virtual veto over appointments and subordinating the Boards, and set it against the ministry’s record of friction with the institutes over the preceding eight years. The institutes themselves, as Moneycontrol reported, were concerned that the amendment took away their autonomy rather than fixing accountability. Those were the positions. What the amendment did, as a matter of text, is the next question, and it is a question the text answers completely.

The parliamentary timelines of the two statutes frame the political difference between them more plainly than any speech. The Bill of 2017 was introduced in the Lok Sabha on 9 February 2017, passed that House on 28 July 2017 after a full debate in which the minister answered the autonomy anxieties of the day, and passed the Rajya Sabha on 19 December 2017, an interval of ten months across two sessions in which the text was public, the institutes and the press had digested it, and its philosophy had been the stated policy of the government since the redraft of 2016. The Bill of 2023 was introduced on 28 July 2023, passed the Lok Sabha on 4 August and the Rajya Sabha on 8 August, received assent on 11 August and came into force on 16 August 2023, nineteen days from introduction to operation, in a session consumed by the Manipur debate, without a committee stage, and with the operative details reserved to rules that followed on 10 November 2023. Neither timeline was irregular; Parliament may legislate at either speed and frequently does. But the contrast belongs in the record because the defenders of the 2017 settlement had built it slowly and in the open, and its partial dismantling was accomplished at the speed the Constitution permits and deliberation rarely survives. When the argument returns, as Indian institutional arguments reliably do, the question of how a settlement of this importance ought to be made and unmade will be part of it.

The 2023 amendment, provision by provision

The Indian Institutes of Management (Amendment) Act, 2023 contains twelve sections, and its method is surgical. It amends Sections 4, 5, 10, 12, 16, 29, 34 and 39 of the principal Act, inserts one new section, omits one section entirely, and amends the Schedule. Every change it makes lies in the field of appointments, oversight and dissolution. None lies in the field of teaching.

The centrepiece is the new Section 10A. Its first sub-section provides that the President of India shall be the Visitor of every institute. The office is borrowed from the older central institution statutes, where the President as Visitor stands at the head of central universities and technology institutes, and its powers in this Act are stated in three further sub-sections. Under Section 10A(2), the Visitor may appoint one or more persons to review the work and progress of any institute and to hold inquiries into the affairs of the institute, and to report in such manner as the Visitor may direct. Under Section 10A(3), the Board may also recommend to the Visitor an inquiry against an institute which has not been functioning in accordance with the provisions and objectives of the Act, a clause that preserves, in recommendatory form, the trigger of the omitted Section 17. Under Section 10A(4), on receipt of such a report, the Visitor may take such action and issue such directions as he considers necessary in respect of any matter dealt with in the report, and the institute shall be bound to comply with those directions. The direction power is the provision to watch. The 2017 Act gave the government no power to direct an institute about anything; the amended Act gives the Visitor a power to direct an institute about any matter that an inquiry report has dealt with, in terms that bind.

Section 4 of the amendment Act rewrites clause (a) of Section 10(2) of the principal Act, substituting, for the words that the Chairperson is to be appointed by the Board, the words that the Chairperson is to be nominated by the Visitor. It also inserts a new Section 10(6): notwithstanding anything in the section, if the Board is suspended or dissolved under such conditions or procedure as may be prescribed, the Central Government shall constitute an interim Board for a period of six months or till a regular Board is constituted in accordance with the Act. Section 10 of the amendment Act correspondingly amends the rule-making power in Section 34(2) so that the conditions and procedure for suspension or dissolution are matters for the Central Government’s rules. The Board of an institute thus holds its existence, for the first time, under a stated contingency: rules made by the government may prescribe the conditions on which it may be suspended or dissolved, and on that event the government installs its replacement for up to six months.

Section 7 of the amendment Act works through Section 16, the Director’s section, and changes every joint in it. In Section 16(2), the Director is no longer simply appointed by the Board on prescribed terms; the Director is appointed by the Board with the prior approval of the Visitor, in such manner and subject to such terms and conditions of service as may be prescribed. Section 16(3) is substituted wholesale: the Director is to be appointed out of the panel of names recommended by a search-cum-selection committee to be constituted by the Board, consisting of the Chairperson of the Board, who chairs the committee, one member to be nominated by the Visitor, and two members chosen from among eminent administrators, industrialists, educationists, scientists, technocrats and management specialists. The committee the Board had staffed entirely from its own world, a chair and three eminent persons, became a committee of four in which one seat belongs to the Visitor’s nominee and the eminent membership fell from three to two. A new Section 16(3A) provides that the procedure to be adopted for the selection of the Director shall be such as may be prescribed, moving the design of the selection process itself from the Board to the rule book of the Central Government. In Section 16(7), the Board’s power to remove the Director on the five stated grounds survives, but the words of the power read that the Board, with the prior approval of the Visitor, may remove the Director from office. And a new Section 16(10) provides that the services of the Director may be terminated by the Visitor, in such manner as may be prescribed, a power held by the Visitor independently of the Board, of the grounds in Section 16(7) and of the enquiry proviso attached to them, its content delegated entirely to rules.

Section 8 of the amendment Act omits Section 17 of the principal Act altogether. The Board’s own inquiry power, the inquiry by a retired judge of a High Court into an institute not functioning in accordance with the Act, with power in the Board to remove the Director or take any other action on the findings, ceased to exist as a Board power and reappeared, in the different form described above, as a function of the Visitor under Section 10A. Section 9 amends Section 29: the Chairperson of the Coordination Forum is no longer selected through the Forum’s own committee but is an eminent person to be nominated by the Visitor, and clause (d) is substituted so that the Chairperson of each institute, rather than the chairpersons of four institutes serving by rotation, is a member of the Forum ex officio. Section 6 inserts a new Section 12(1A), under which an outgoing member of a Board continues in office, unless the Board directs otherwise, until a successor is appointed or nominated, a continuity provision that prevents a Board from lapsing into vacancy. Sections 2, 3, 11 and 12 of the amendment Act make the Mumbai change and its consequences: a new Section 4(1A) provides that the National Institute of Industrial Engineering, Mumbai shall be called the Indian Institute of Management, Mumbai and that all the provisions of the Act shall apply to it; the Schedule gains a twenty-first entry; Section 5 is adjusted so that the continuity of employment on incorporation extends to the Mumbai institute’s staff with the position of its Director dealt with expressly; and Section 39’s transitional provisions carry the existing Mumbai board, academic council, rules and bye-laws forward until new ones are constituted under the Act.

The rules followed within the year, as the amendment’s design required them to, since so much of the new architecture is delegated to prescription. The Indian Institutes of Management Rules were amended in November 2023. As the Indian Express reported on 11 November 2023, the amended rules provide that the Visitor shall nominate one of the names recommended by the Board for appointment as Director, and that where the Visitor is not satisfied with the names recommended, the Board may be asked to make fresh recommendations through the search-cum-selection process. On dissolution, the rules state the grounds on which the Visitor may dissolve a Board: that the Board, on account of circumstances beyond its control, is unable to discharge the functions or perform the duties imposed on it by or under the Act; that the Board has persistently defaulted in complying with directions given by the Visitor or in discharging its functions, and that as a result the academic position or the governance of the institute has suffered; or that circumstances exist which render dissolution necessary in the public interest. On dissolution, an interim Chairperson and members are appointed for a period not exceeding six months. The amended rules also tightened the eligibility of a Director, prescribing a distinguished academic with first-class degrees at both the bachelor’s and master’s level and a PhD or equivalent from a reputed institution, in place of the simpler earlier description of a distinguished academic with a PhD or equivalent.

Twelve provisions, before and after

The whole argument of this article is visible in one object. Read the two columns and note what kind of provision appears in each row: not one of them concerns a syllabus, an admission or a research programme.

Governance function	Under the IIM Act 2017 as enacted	After the 2023 amendment
Visitor of the institute	No Visitor; the office did not exist in the Act	The President of India is Visitor of every institute (Section 10A)
Appointment of the Chairperson	Appointed by the Board from among eminent persons	Nominated by the Visitor (Section 10(2)(a))
Nomination of Board members	Board nominated or co-opted every member beyond the two government nominees	Composition unchanged, but the Board sits under a Visitor-nominated Chairperson
Constitution of the search committee for the Director	Constituted by the Board: its Chairperson plus three eminent members	Board’s Chairperson, one member nominated by the Visitor, and two eminent members (Section 16(3))
Appointment of the Director	By the Board, from the committee’s panel, with no external approval	By the Board with the prior approval of the Visitor, from the committee’s panel (Section 16(2))
Procedure for selecting the Director	Governed by the Board’s own committee process	As prescribed by the Central Government’s rules (Section 16(3A))
Removal of the Director	By the Board, on five stated grounds, after an enquiry with a hearing	By the Board on the same grounds, with the prior approval of the Visitor (Section 16(7))
Termination of the Director’s services	No power outside Section 16(7) removal	The Visitor may terminate the Director’s services in the manner prescribed (Section 16(10))
Inquiry into an institute’s affairs	By the Board, through a retired judge of a High Court (Section 17)	By persons appointed by the Visitor, whose directions on the report bind the institute; Section 17 omitted (Section 10A)
Suspension or dissolution of the Board	No provision; the Board could not be dissolved	On conditions and procedure prescribed by the Central Government’s rules (Section 10(6))
Interim Board	No provision	Constituted by the Central Government for six months or until a regular Board is constituted (Section 10(6))
Chairperson of the Coordination Forum	Selected through a search-cum-selection committee of the Forum	Nominated by the Visitor; every institute Chairperson sits ex officio (Section 29)
Institutes within the Act	Twenty, as listed in the Schedule	Twenty-one, the National Institute of Industrial Engineering, Mumbai becoming the Indian Institute of Management, Mumbai

The rules of November 2023: the settlement beneath the settlement

Because so much of the amended Act speaks in the formula “as may be prescribed”, the rules are not an appendix to the story but its operative second half, and they reward the same close reading. The appointment rules construct the approval as a choice within a panel. The Board, through its search-cum-selection committee, recommends names; the Visitor nominates one of the names recommended and sends it to the Board for appointment; and where the Visitor is not satisfied with the names recommended, the Board is to obtain a fresh panel of three names through the same committee or a fresh one. The architecture is worth pausing on. The Visitor cannot appoint an outsider, cannot reach past the panel to a candidate of the ministry’s own finding, and cannot leave the office unfilled by silence, since the mechanism contemplates iteration until a nomination is made. What the Visitor holds is a veto with a duty to choose, which is a materially different power from a power of appointment, and the distinction will matter in every contested case: the government of the day shapes the directorship by controlling the gateway and the criteria, while the professional judgment that produces the shortlist remains, formally, the Board’s committee’s.

The eligibility rules then narrow the pool from the other side. Where the rules had described the Director as a distinguished academic with a PhD or equivalent, the amended rules prescribe a distinguished academic holding first-class degrees at both the bachelor’s and the master’s level, with a PhD or equivalent from a reputed institution. A criterion of that kind is simultaneously a quality filter and a boundary of the permissible: every candidate educated in a system without first-class divisions, every practitioner-scholar whose distinction is not credentialed in the prescribed sequence, is excluded before any committee sits. It was that criterion, notified on 10 November 2023, that produced the scheme’s first reported judgment, the Delhi High Court’s dismissal of the challenge to it in January 2024, and the Court’s reasoning, that a higher merit stipulation reduces the possibility of political factors, deserves to be read beside the Bhargava Committee’s older anxiety, that appointment criteria should be broad-based precisely so that political factors are ruled out. The two propositions pull in opposite directions from the same premise, that criteria are where politics enters or is excluded, and the disagreement between a committee of 2008 and a court of 2024 over whether breadth or height of criteria is the better prophylactic is a genuine jurisprudential fork that the amendment’s history has exposed.

The dissolution rules complete the picture by giving the contingency of Section 10(6) a defined shape. The grounds, as reported from the notified rules, are three: a Board unable, on account of circumstances beyond its control, to discharge the functions or perform the duties the Act imposes; a Board that has persistently defaulted in complying with the Visitor’s directions or in discharging its functions, with the consequence that the academic position or the governance of the institute has suffered; and circumstances rendering dissolution necessary in the public interest. The middle ground contains an effects test, persistent default plus demonstrated suffering of academic position or governance, which a court could meaningfully review. The third ground contains none: public interest is the standard the government of the day defines, and its presence in the rules means that the dissolution power, for all the care of its drafting elsewhere, ultimately rests on the same open texture as ground five of the Director’s removal grounds in Section 16(7), abuse of position rendering continuance prejudicial to the public interest. A statute’s true centre of gravity is often found in its widest clause, and between the public interest ground for dissolving boards and the Visitor’s direction power on any matter an inquiry report deals with, the amended Act’s widest clauses are very wide indeed. How heavily those wide clauses weigh in practice is a question the text cannot answer and this article does not pretend to answer from silence: it depends on whether dissolutions are ordered, inquiries commissioned and directions issued, and on the subjects chosen when they are. The textual point stands on its own, that the capacity exists, is lawful, is framed at its widest in the language of public interest, and is held at the centre.

What the amendment left untouched

A reversal this complete in one field makes the silence in every other field the more instructive. The amendment did not touch Section 2, so the declaration of national importance stands as enacted. It did not touch Sections 6 to 9, so the objects of the institutes, their openness to all classes of citizens, the reservation framework in admissions and their not-for-profit character stand as enacted. It did not touch Section 7, so the power to grant degrees and the power to fix fees remain the institutes’ own, exercisable without prior approval of any kind. It did not touch Section 11, so the Board still approves the budget, frames the regulations, specifies the fees, reviews the Director’s performance annually and commissions the triennial external evaluation. It did not touch Sections 14, 15 or 36, so the Academic Council still settles the criteria for admission and the content of programmes, and still makes the Ordinances on courses and examinations. It did not touch Chapter IV, so the audit by the Comptroller and Auditor-General, the laying of accounts and annual reports before Parliament, and the application of the Right to Information Act all stand as enacted.

Did the 2023 amendment change what an IIM teaches or whom it admits?

No. The amendment altered no provision on curriculum, admissions, examinations or research. Sections 7, 8, 14 and 15 of the Act, which carry the degree power, the admissions framework and the Academic Council’s authority over academic content, stand word for word as enacted in 2017. Every change the amendment made lies in appointments, inquiry and dissolution.

The pattern is the finding. A government that wished to reverse the autonomy settlement of 2017 had no need to legislate about education at all, and it did not. It legislated about persons: who chairs the board, who sits on the committee that shortlists the director, who approves the appointment, who approves the removal, who may end the director’s service outright, who inquires, and who picks up the pieces when a board is dissolved. The academic statute was left standing in its entirety, and the governance statute inside it was rewritten. Whether that distinction, between the academic and the managerial, is as stable in practice as it is on the page is the question the two sides argue about, and it cannot be answered from the text alone.

The untouched provisions have continued to operate in their original sense, and their operation is the control group against which the amendment’s effects should be measured. The fee power under Section 11(2)(m) remains exercisable by each Board through its own regulations, with no approval stage added in 2023, so the most politically sensitive number in the system, the price of the two-year programme, is still set in twenty-two boardrooms and not in the ministry. The admissions machinery of Sections 8 and 15 remains the Academic Council’s, the common admission test remains an instrument the institutes run for themselves, and the reservation framework that Parliament wrote into the Act in 2017 applies exactly as enacted. The degree power of Section 7(f) has been exercised at every convocation since the amendment under the same words that produced the first degrees of 2019, and no institute has treated the change of governance regime as touching its power to award them. The audit chain of Sections 23 to 28 is unamended, the Comptroller and Auditor-General audits the institutes as before, and the annual reports continue to be laid before Parliament by the same route. Even the Act’s decentralised instruments survived: Boards still make regulations under Section 35, Academic Councils still make Ordinances under Section 36, and the Coordination Forum, reconstituted at its head, still deliberates and recommends rather than directs. A reader who asks what the amendment was about should begin from this inventory, because it eliminates the usual subjects of education legislation, curriculum, admissions, fees, degrees, audit, from the field of dispute, and leaves standing only the question the whole article has pursued: who chooses the people who run the institutes, and who can remove them.

The anatomy of the reversal: five functions of appointment law

The table above lists the changes; this section names what each of them does, because appointment law works through distinct functions and the amendment took all of them. The first function is gatekeeping: the power to decide who may enter the room. Section 10(2)(a) as amended gives the gate of the chairperson’s office to the Visitor, and Section 16(2) gives the Visitor a gate across the Director’s office in the form of prior approval, with the rules converting the approval into a selection among the Board’s recommended names, renewable at the Visitor’s instance by a demand for fresh recommendations. The second function is agenda-setting inside the room: a chairperson nominated from outside chairs the Board and also chairs the search committee, so the nominating authority’s presence is felt in the conduct of business and in the composition of every future shortlist, without a single direction ever being issued. The third function is the constitution of the filter: Section 16(3) places the Visitor’s nominee inside the search committee and reduces the independent eminent membership from three to two, while Section 16(3A) hands the very procedure of selection to the government’s rules, so the filter itself is centrally staffed and centrally specified. The fourth function is exit: removal under Section 16(7) requires the Visitor’s approval, and termination under Section 16(10) is the Visitor’s own act, in a manner the rules prescribe, so both doors out of the Director’s office open from the same external hand. The fifth function is succession and survival: the inquiry power of Section 10A, the dissolution contingency of Section 10(6) and the interim Board that follows it together mean that the Board itself, and not only its officers, holds its place subject to an external judgment on its functioning, delivered through persons the Visitor appoints and directions the institute must obey.

Set against the 2017 text function by function, the pattern is exact. In 2017 the gate, the agenda, the filter, the exit and the survival of the institution’s government were all internal, and the state’s functions were confined to funding, auditing and receiving reports. In the amended text every one of the five functions has an external holder or an external checkpoint, and the state’s remaining functions are unchanged. This is why descriptions of the amendment as a modest accountability measure and descriptions of it as a takeover can both quote the statute honestly: the measure is modest in the number of sections it touches and total in the number of governance functions it reaches. It is also why the delegation pattern matters. The amendment’s hardest edges are not in the Act at all. The conditions of dissolution, the procedure of selection, the manner of termination and the Director’s terms of service all sit in rules the Central Government makes under Section 34, laid before Parliament under Section 37 but written in the ministry. Parliament in August 2023 voted for a distribution of power whose operative content would be settled afterwards, in instruments most citizens will never read, which is the standard technique by which modern Indian statutes move authority from legislatures to executives while appearing to move it between named offices.

The argument, stated at full strength on both sides

The government’s case begins with money and ends with the structure of accountability. The institutes are publicly created and publicly funded; Pradhan told the Lok Sabha that the Centre had spent over Rs 6,000 crore in setting them up, and the figure understates the public stake, which includes land granted by states, decades of grant support for the older institutes and the salary bill of the newer ones. A board that appoints its own chairperson, nominates or co-opts all but two of its members, and appoints the director from a panel produced by a committee it constitutes itself is, as a matter of institutional design, accountable to nobody outside itself. The accountability instruments of the 2017 Act, audit, evaluation and annual reports, all operate after the event and none of them can correct a bad appointment, still less a board that has settled into mediocrity or captured the institute for a faction. Every other family of central institutions lives under a Visitor. The President is Visitor of the central universities and appoints their vice-chancellors; the President is Visitor of the technology institutes, whose directors are appointed through a structure in which the Visitor and the Council for the institutes play the decisive roles; and as Pradhan observed in the debate, no one suggests that the Indian Institutes of Technology lack academic autonomy on that account. The full comparison of the three statutory models, and the question of which of them gives an institution the most autonomy in practice, belongs to the comparison of the central institution Acts, and is not re-argued here. The government’s narrower point is one of alignment: the amendment brought the management institutes into the constitutional pattern of the rest of the public system, with a head of state as Visitor exercising powers of the same family, appointment approval, inquiry and intervention, that exist elsewhere. Add the supporting voices in the Rajya Sabha debate, where members argued that in the name of autonomy an institution funded by government cannot refuse accountability to government and Parliament, and that fees had risen so high that poor students were shut out of the institutes, and the case is complete: autonomy of operations, yes; a self-perpetuating governing class answerable to no one, no.

The counter-case begins with the identity of the legislator. The 2017 design was not an accident, an oversight or a relic of a previous regime. It was the considered work of the same Parliament and the same ruling party, drafted after the ministry’s own first attempt at a control-oriented statute had been examined and set aside at the highest level of the same government in 2016. When Jairam Ramesh said the government was undoing what it itself had introduced, the chronology bore him out in every particular, and the government’s own mover of the 2017 Bill had described its purpose, on the floor of the Lok Sabha, as removing the government’s interference in the institutes. No published finding of governance failure at any institute preceded the reversal: no committee indicted a board, no audit exposed a scandal, no court condemned an appointment. The institutes learned of the change as a settled direction of policy, and the six oldest of them were not in the room when the package was assented to in September 2022. On the merits, the counter-case denies that the distinction between management accountability and academic autonomy can survive contact with the appointment power. A director who holds office subject to the prior approval of the Visitor for appointment and removal, and to termination by the Visitor in a manner the government’s rules prescribe, will govern with one eye on the Visitor’s office; a chairperson nominated by the Visitor will chair accordingly; and the Visitor, although the President in form, acts on the advice of the Council of Ministers, so that the approval in question is, in constitutional reality, the approval of the ministry. The Indian Express’s editorial description of a virtual veto over appointments is, on the text, difficult to dispute: a power of prior approval is a power to refuse, and a power to refuse an appointment is a power to shape every shortlist in advance, since committees do not recommend names they expect to be refused. Appointment power is not one lever among many. It is the lever that reaches curriculum, hiring, research priorities and institutional courage without ever naming them.

The government’s case has one more layer that its critics rarely engage, and fairness requires it to be stated. Prior approval, the ministry’s defenders argue, is not appointment. The Board still constitutes the search committee, still receives its panel and still makes the appointment; the Visitor’s approval is a check at the gate, of the same family as the approvals the 2017 Act itself retained over land disposal and staff cadres, and a check is what distinguishes a publicly owned institution from a private one. The institutes, on this view, kept everything that makes an institution academically itself: their Boards, their budgets, their fees, their programmes, their faculty appointments and their degree power, and lost only the claim that no one outside the Board room could question who entered it. There is also a structural fact that cut in the government’s favour inside the family itself. The younger institutes, still building campuses and dependent on central capital grants, had never enjoyed the practical independence of Ahmedabad or Bangalore, and their directors, consulted in September 2022, assented to the amendments; the autonomy the amendment retrieved was, in the lived experience of half the system, thinner than the statute’s text suggested. A settlement defended most warmly by the institutes that needed it least was vulnerable to exactly the charge the government made, that it protected incumbency as much as independence.

Two features of the opposition’s conduct of the argument deserve record alongside its content. The first is its institutional channel: the critics’ most repeated procedural complaint was that a bill reversing a six-year-old settlement, itself the product of years of consultation, was not sent to a parliamentary standing committee despite demands that it should be, and was carried by voice votes in both Houses, in the Lok Sabha during the disruptions of the Manipur session. The Indian Express editorial made the drafting charge in its sharpest form, calling the approval requirement a virtual veto over appointments while presenting it as accountability. The second feature is the opposition’s reliance on committee authority of an older vintage. The Bhargava Committee of 2008, the last full official review of IIM governance before the 2017 Act, had treated the institutes’ governance as a design problem to be solved by strengthening boards and widening the base from which directors are chosen, and its broad-based-criteria philosophy resurfaced in the 2024 litigation over the eligibility rules as the standard against which narrowing was measured. Against it stood the ministry’s own committee-era inheritance of a different kind: the long official habit, visible in the 2015 draft and in the coordinating councils of the technology institutes, of treating a central coordinating authority as the natural form of accountability for publicly funded institutions. The 2023 debate was, among other things, a contest between two official traditions, the review-committee tradition that trusted boards and the ministry tradition that trusted councils and visitors, and the ministry tradition won because it held the drafting hand.

Between the two cases, the texts support a judgment on the narrow point and forbid one on the wide point. On the narrow point, the verdict is clear: the amendment is a genuine and substantial retrieval of the 2017 settlement, effected entirely through appointment, inquiry and dissolution provisions, and descriptions of it as a mere accountability adjustment do not survive a reading of Sections 10A, 16(2), 16(7) and 16(10). It is equally clear, and the government’s spokesmen were entitled to the point, that nothing in the amendment touches an academic provision, that the Visitor model is the standard pattern of Indian central institutions rather than an invention aimed at the management institutes, and that the 2017 Board, self-selecting in seventeen of nineteen places, was an accountability anomaly that no other family of public institutions was permitted. On the wide point, whether the retrieved powers will be used as instruments of management accountability or as instruments of influence over what the institutes do, the texts cannot say, because the powers are framed in terms wide enough for either use: an inquiry into the affairs of an institute, directions binding on the institute on any matter an inquiry report deals with, termination of a director in a manner to be prescribed. The evidence that will decide the question is the record of the powers’ use over time, the panels approved and refused, the inquiries ordered and their subjects, the dissolutions threatened or made. That record is the test both sides should accept, because it is the only one that distinguishes a safeguard from a leash.

Two features of the opposition’s conduct of the argument deserve record alongside its content. The first is its institutional channel: the critics’ most repeated procedural complaint was that a bill reversing a six-year-old settlement, itself the product of years of consultation, was not sent to a parliamentary standing committee despite demands that it should be, and was carried by voice votes in both Houses, in the Lok Sabha during the disruptions of the Manipur session. The Indian Express editorial made the drafting charge in its sharpest form, calling the approval requirement a virtual veto over appointments while presenting it as accountability. The second feature is the opposition’s reliance on committee authority of an older vintage. The Bhargava Committee of 2008, the last full official review of IIM governance before the 2017 Act, had treated the institutes’ governance as a design problem to be solved by strengthening boards and widening the base from which directors are chosen, and its broad-based-criteria philosophy resurfaced in the 2024 litigation over the eligibility rules as the standard against which narrowing was measured. Against it stood an official habit of a different kind, visible in the 2015 draft and in the coordinating councils of the technology institutes, of treating a central coordinating authority as the natural form of accountability for publicly funded institutions. The 2023 debate was, among other things, a contest between two official traditions, the review-committee tradition that trusted boards and the ministry tradition that trusted councils and visitors, and the ministry tradition won because it held the drafting hand.

The Visitor in Indian law: an old office, newly arrived

The office the amendment imported has a long pedigree, and the pedigree cuts both ways in the argument. The visitorial idea descends from the law of eleemosynary corporations in England, where the founder of a charitable corporation, or the Crown as founder of last resort, retained a visitor whose jurisdiction over the internal affairs of the foundation was, within its sphere, exclusive. Indian central institution statutes naturalised the office with the President of India in the visitorial chair: the President is Visitor of the central universities under their several Acts and of the technology institutes under the Institutes of Technology Act, 1961, and in the state sphere the Governor as Chancellor performs the cognate office for state universities. The classical visitorial powers are supervisory rather than managerial: to cause an inspection or inquiry to be made into the working of the institution, to annul proceedings that offend the Act or the statutes, and in the university Acts to appoint the vice-chancellor from a panel. The Supreme Court’s Chancellor jurisprudence, Govinda Rao and Kulshreshtha, grew up around the state analogue of the office and supplies the received understanding of its limits: the visitorial authority is powerful inside its statutory sphere, is owed deference on academic merits, and is amenable to correction where it breaks the statute that creates it.

Measured against that pedigree, Section 10A is both orthodox and novel. It is orthodox in its inquiry-and-direction core, which reproduces the classical supervisory pattern: appoint persons to review and inquire, receive their report, issue directions that bind. It is novel in its combination. The classical Visitor of a central university appoints the vice-chancellor from a panel, yet the management institute scheme adds a prior approval over removal, a personal power to terminate the Director’s services in a prescribed manner, a nominee inside the search committee, the nomination of the Board’s Chairperson, and, through the rules, a power to dissolve the Board itself on grounds that include the public interest. No single element is without precedent somewhere in Indian institutional law. The accumulation in one office, over institutions that had been deliberately constituted without the office six years earlier, is the amendment’s distinctive act, and it is why arguments from pedigree, the government pointing to sixty years of the Visitor at the technology institutes, and arguments from reversal, the opposition pointing to the institutes’ six years without one, pass each other by. Both are describing the same office at different moments of its long Indian career.

What the courts have said, and what they have not been asked

No court has been asked to rule on the validity of the 2023 amendment’s appointment provisions, and no reported judgment does so. The litigation the new dispensation has produced concerns its instruments rather than its architecture. In January 2024 the Delhi High Court dismissed a public interest petition by Firoz Ahmad challenging the notification of 10 November 2023 that prescribed the tightened eligibility criteria for directors under the amended rules. The petitioner argued that the criteria, first-class degrees at the bachelor’s and master’s level and a doctorate from a reputed institution, restricted the field without a rational connection to the object of finding visionary leadership, and invoked the Bhargava Committee’s view that the criteria for appointing directors should be broad-based and should rule out political factors. The Court held that the stipulation of a higher merit for a post in an educational institution could not be set aside on the ground that it restricts the available talent, that a higher stipulation would in fact reduce the possibility of political factors coming into play, and that the petitioner had shown no discrimination of the kind Section 8 of the Act forbids. The petition was dismissed as bereft of merit.

The older design has met a court, and the encounter is instructive about what the amendment changed. In April 2025 the Punjab and Haryana High Court decided proceedings arising from a show cause notice that the ministry had served on the Director of the Indian Institute of Management Rohtak. Reading Sections 16 and 17 of the Act as enacted, the Court held that the appointing and disciplinary authority for the post of Director was the Board of Governors and not the ministry, and that the ministry had no jurisdiction to serve the notice. The judgment is a precise measure of the 2017 settlement’s legal force: the Board’s monopoly of discipline was not a convention or a courtesy but a statutory position a court would enforce against the government itself. It is equally a measure of the amendment, since the provisions on which the judgment rests have since been rewritten or omitted, and a ministry acting within the amended Sections 10A and 16 occupies ground the judgment’s reasoning does not reach.

How far can a court go in reviewing a Visitor’s decision?

Not far into the merits, on the settled doctrine. The Supreme Court’s line from the University of Mysore case to Kulshreshtha is that courts defer to academic and appointing authorities on questions of academic judgment, and intervene where the authority has contravened the statute or a binding rule, acted mala fide, or produced an illegality or a clear injustice.

The institutes’ amenability to constitutional review has been confirmed in a different line of cases, which matters because it marks the boundary of what statutory autonomy means. In proceedings concerning the Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode, the Kerala High Court held that a writ petition is maintainable against an institute for the enforcement of a statutory duty or a public duty, noting that although the institute’s governing body is constituted by nomination and the institute was intended to be autonomous, it originated as a society and discharges public functions. Autonomy under the Act, in other words, was never immunity from the Constitution: the institutes remained public authorities under the transparency statute, employers bound by public law standards in their service matters, and bodies whose statutory decisions a High Court could examine. The 2017 settlement protected the institutes from the ministry. It did not protect them, and was never understood to protect them, from the courts.

The doctrine that would frame any future challenge is old and stable. In the University of Mysore v. C. D. Govinda Rao, a Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court considered a challenge surrounding an appointment annulled by the Chancellor of the university and held that the question for a court is whether the appointment made by the Chancellor contravened any statutory provision or binding rule or ordinance, and that in academic matters the courts should be slow to interfere with the opinion expressed by expert bodies in the absence of mala fides; the regard a court owes the expert body is regard for its opinion on the academic question, not obedience to its view of the law. In Dr J. P. Kulshreshtha v. Chancellor, Allahabad University, decided on 30 April 1980, the Supreme Court, speaking through Krishna Iyer J., refined the boundary in a dispute over the selection of Readers at Allahabad, in which everything turned on the construction of an ordinance governing qualifications: where a Chancellor or a similar authority decides an academic matter or an educational question, the court keeps its hands off, but where a provision of law has to be read and understood, it is not fair to keep the court out, since to respect an authority is not to worship it unquestioningly, and any authority in the system, however high, is bound by the rule of law and cannot be a law unto itself. A challenge to a Visitor’s refusal of approval, or to a dissolution, or to a termination, would be argued inside that frame: the choice among candidates would be nearly unreviewable, while a failure to follow the statute’s own procedure, the rules made under it, or the requirements of a fair hearing written into Section 16(7) would be squarely within the court’s province. The amendment, in other words, moved the powers; it did not and could not move the standard by which their exercise is judged.

Verdict: autonomy lives in the appointment clauses

The series to which this article belongs has repeatedly found that the operative provision of a statute is seldom the one the statute is named for, and the IIM Act is the purest instance in the higher education field. The Act is named for a declaration, and the declaration changed nothing by itself. It is celebrated for a degree power, and the degree power, though it transformed the credentials of every graduate, was an ordinary clause of Section 7 that no one has since disturbed. The autonomy for which the Act was praised in 2017, and mourned in 2023, resided throughout in four places: clause (a) of Section 10(2), on who chairs the board; Section 16(2) and (3), on who chooses the director and by what committee; Section 16(7), on who may end the director’s tenure; and the silence of the Act on any Visitor, any inquiry from outside, and any dissolution. The amendment of 2023 rewrote exactly those places and no others. Institutional autonomy in India, the two statutes together demonstrate, is not a quality an institution has. It is a set of appointment provisions a statute contains, and it lasts exactly as long as the legislature that granted it declines to amend them. That is not a counsel of despair for the institutes, whose academic provisions stand untouched and whose boards still govern their budgets, fees, programmes and staff. It is a rule for reading every future autonomy statute, in this sector and beyond: skip the preamble, find the appointment clauses, and read those twice. The general position described in this article is legal information about a statutory scheme, not advice on any institute’s internal proceedings, and a reader concerned in a live governance dispute should take advice on its facts.

The rule travels beyond education, and the series has met it in a different uniform. The Reserve Bank of India’s statute speaks the language of an autonomous central bank, yet the lived independence of that office has always tracked the provisions on the appointment, tenure and removal of the Governor rather than the charter’s declarations, which is the point developed in the series’ account of the Reserve Bank of India Act, 1934. A central bank and a management institute have nothing else in common, and that is precisely why the parallel instructs: in institution after institution, the drafters who wish to grant independence write it in the appointment clauses or nowhere, and the governments that wish to retrieve it amend the same clauses and leave the preamble’s fine words standing, because the fine words were never the load-bearing part of the structure.

The comparison with the older institutional families is the standing invitation to test the rule. The technology institutes have lived under a Visitor for six decades and built a formidable academic culture within that architecture, which is the government’s best evidence that the Visitor model and academic distinction can coexist. The management institutes lived outside it for six years and produced, in that interval, the degrees, the boards and the frictions this article has recorded, and the amendment placed both families under materially similar appointment law. What differs is the direction of travel, and direction is data. A statute that grants appointment power to an institution’s own board announces that the state trusts the institution; a statute that retrieves it announces the opposite; and the announcement itself, heard by every director, chairperson and professor who must decide how much institutional risk to take, may prove to be the amendment’s largest effect. The provisions will be used or left unused, the approvals given or withheld, the inquiries ordered or not ordered, and on that record, in time, the argument of 2023 will be settled by the only evidence capable of settling it.

A closing word on the quality of that evidence, because both sides in the 2023 debate argued from design and neither could argue from outcomes. The amendment’s defenders cannot point, from the first years of its operation, to a class of failure it has cured: their case is preventive, that gatekeeping exists so that capture, drift and unaccountability do not occur, and a preventive case is by construction unverifiable in the short run. The amendment’s critics cannot point to a class of abuse it has committed: their case is structural, that the powers exist and will chill, and a structural case matures slowly and deniably. The honest reader is therefore left with indicators rather than findings. Watch whether approvals are withheld, and on what stated grounds. Watch whether inquiries under Section 10A are commissioned against institutes in dispute with the ministry or distributed without visible pattern. Watch whether panels returned for fresh recommendations share any feature, and whether chairpersons nominated under the new dispensation differ in kind from those the Boards chose for themselves. Watch, above all, whether the academic provisions that no one amended show any drift in the direction the critics feared, since the government staked its case on their safety. Until those indicators accumulate, the texts themselves are the evidence, and on the texts the verdict of this article stands: the amendment of 2023 transferred the government of the institutes’ government from the institutes to the Visitor in every function that decides who holds power, while leaving the exercise of academic power, once held, in the institutes’ hands. Whether that transfer is named accountability or control is, in the end, a judgment about how much of an institution’s freedom resides in its power to choose its own governors. The Parliament of 2017 thought the freedom resided almost wholly there. The Parliament of 2023 thought it resided almost wholly elsewhere. The record of the two Parliaments, set side by side, is the fullest account available of how India changed its mind, and the institutes will be governed, for as long as the amended text stands, by the second answer.

Three paradoxes the two statutes leave behind

The record of 2017 and 2023 leaves three paradoxes that any future reformer of Indian higher education will inherit. The first is the paradox of accountability by delegation. The amendment of 2023 was defended in the language of accountability to Parliament and the public, yet its operative content, the selection procedure, the termination manner, the dissolution conditions and the Director’s eligibility, was placed in rules made by the executive and merely laid before Parliament, so the transfer of power ran not from the institutes to the legislature but from the institutes to the ministry, with the legislature’s role confined to authorising the transfer in general words. Accountability upward to a minister is a real thing, but it is not the accountability the debate advertised, and the distance between the two is measured in the November rules, which no House debated. The second is the paradox of legibility. The 2017 Act had not left the institutes unaccountable; it had made them accountable by publication, audited accounts laid before Parliament, annual reports, triennial evaluations in the public domain, transparency under the information statute, and the wager failed politically rather than legally: a government persuaded that it could not answer for institutions it did not appoint discovered that published accounts are a weaker instrument in a parliamentary answer than an appointment letter. The settlement of 2017 solved the problem of knowledge and left unsolved the problem of answerability, and the amendment of 2023 solved the second by abandoning the first’s premise. The third is the paradox of uniformity. One statute governed twenty institutes of vastly unequal age, wealth and confidence as though they were one institution, and the defence of that statute, when it came, was mounted by the six that least needed its protection and acquiesced in by the many that most depended on the funder the statute excluded. A settlement that distributes identical rights to unequals will be defended unequally, and the amendment’s passage through a divided family is the demonstration. None of the three paradoxes is an argument for either statute. Together they are the durable lesson of the episode, that institutional design in this field fails not at its principles but at its joints, between legislature and executive, between knowledge and answerability, and between the text’s uniformity and the system’s variety.

The postscript of 2025: the template applied to a new institute

The amended architecture received a quiet confirmation two years after its enactment. When Parliament next added an institute to the family, by the Indian Institutes of Management (Amendment) Act, 2025, Act 31 of 2025, which brought the Indian Institute of Management Guwahati into the Schedule with effect from 1 September 2025, the new institute was born directly into the post-2023 constitution: a Visitor above its Board, a Chairperson to be nominated by the Visitor, a Director to be appointed with the Visitor’s prior approval and removable only with it. No one proposed that the newest institute begin life under the 2017 dispensation and migrate later. The episode is small and entirely uncontentious, and for that reason it is the best evidence of what the 2023 amendment settled. The argument of 2017 and 2023 is closed as a matter of legislative design; the 2023 text is the template, and new institutes will be drafted into it as a matter of course. What remains open is only the question the texts cannot answer, how the Visitor’s powers will be used inside a template that is no longer contested.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What did the IIM Act 2017 change for the institutes?

The Act converted twenty registered societies into statutory bodies corporate. Section 2 declared each institute an institution of national importance, Section 4 gave it perpetual succession, a common seal and the power to hold property and sue in its own name, and Section 5 carried across the property, staff, students and pending proceedings of each society. Section 7 empowered the institutes to grant degrees and to fix their own fees. Section 10 made the Board of Governors the principal executive body and let it appoint its own Chairperson and the Director, with one nominee each of the Central and State Governments on a board of up to nineteen. The institutes also became subject to audit by the Comptroller and Auditor-General and to the Right to Information Act, 2005.

Q: Why was the IIM Act called the most autonomous higher education law?

Because of where it put the appointments. In other central institution statutes the President as Visitor appoints the vice-chancellor or stands behind the appointment of the director, and the ministry keeps a substantial presence in governance. The IIM Act created no Visitor, gave the Central Government a single seat on each Board and no veto over anything, let the Board appoint its own Chairperson, and let the Board appoint and remove the Director through a search committee of its own constitution. Prakash Javadekar, moving the Bill in the Lok Sabha in July 2017, said its aim was to remove the government’s interference in the institutes, and opposition members praised the Bill for restricting the government’s role. The description rested on the appointment clauses, and on nothing else in the Act.

Q: What did the 2023 IIM amendment do?

The Indian Institutes of Management (Amendment) Act, 2023, Act 23 of 2023, assented to on 11 August 2023 and in force from 16 August 2023, inserted Section 10A making the President of India the Visitor of every institute. The Visitor nominates the Chairperson of each Board, gives or withholds prior approval for the appointment and removal of a Director, holds a nominee’s seat on the search-cum-selection committee, may terminate a Director’s services in the manner prescribed, and may appoint persons to review an institute’s work and hold inquiries into its affairs, issuing directions that bind the institute. The amendment also omitted the Board’s own inquiry provision in Section 17, provided for interim Boards where a Board is suspended or dissolved, and brought the National Institute of Industrial Engineering, Mumbai within the Act as the Indian Institute of Management, Mumbai.

Q: Who now appoints an IIM director?

Formally, the Board of Governors still appoints the Director, but the appointment is no longer the Board’s alone. Under the amended Section 16(2), the Director is appointed by the Board with the prior approval of the Visitor, out of a panel recommended by a search-cum-selection committee constituted by the Board and consisting of the Board’s Chairperson, one member nominated by the Visitor and two members chosen from among eminent administrators, industrialists, educationists, scientists, technocrats and management specialists. The procedure for selection is prescribed by the Central Government’s rules, and under the rules amended in November 2023 the Visitor nominates one of the names recommended by the Board and may ask the Board to make fresh recommendations where the panel is not accepted.

Q: Can the government dissolve an IIM board?

The 2017 Act contained no power to dissolve a Board at all. The 2023 amendment inserted Section 10(6), under which, if a Board is suspended or dissolved under such conditions or procedure as may be prescribed, the Central Government shall constitute an interim Board for six months or until a regular Board is constituted. The conditions were prescribed in the rules amended in November 2023, which empower the Visitor to dissolve a Board where it is unable to discharge its functions on account of circumstances beyond its control, where it has persistently defaulted in complying with the Visitor’s directions or in discharging its functions so that the institute’s academic position or governance has suffered, or where circumstances render dissolution necessary in the public interest.

Q: Why did the same government reverse its own autonomy law?

The stated reason was accountability. Piloting the amendment in the Lok Sabha in August 2023, the Education Minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, said the government had no intention of taking away the institutes’ academic accountability and that the Bill ensured their management accountability, pointing to over Rs 6,000 crore of central expenditure on the institutes and to the Visitor model that already governed the technology institutes and central universities. The opposition read the same facts differently: Jairam Ramesh said the government was undoing legislation it had itself introduced with wide support six years earlier. No published finding of governance failure at any institute preceded the change; the government presented it as a correction of design, its critics as a retrieval of control.

Q: Do IIMs award degrees or diplomas now?

Degrees. Section 7 of the Act empowers each institute to grant degrees, diplomas and other academic distinctions, and Section 11 empowers the Board to grant them. The power was first exercised at the convocations of 2019: the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad awarded the Master of Business Administration degree at its fifty-fourth convocation on 17 March 2019 to the postgraduate batch of 2017 to 2019, Bangalore and other institutes awarded degrees in the same season, and the fellow programme became a doctoral degree. An institute remains free to award a diploma on a programme where it chooses, and some executive and certificate offerings continue to be diplomas, but the flagship two-year postgraduate programme leads to a degree.

Q: What does the IIM experience show about statutory autonomy?

It shows that autonomy in Indian institutional law is a function of appointment provisions and of nothing else. The 2017 Act granted autonomy by placing the chairperson, the director, the search committee and the inquiry power inside the institute, and the 2023 amendment retrieved it by moving those same levers to a Visitor, without altering a single provision on curriculum, admissions, examinations or research. Declarations, objects clauses and even degree powers were irrelevant to the transfer in both directions. The lesson generalises: to know how autonomous a statutory institution is, read who appoints its head, who approves the removal, who may inquire into its affairs and who may dissolve its governing body, and treat every other statement about autonomy as decoration.

Q: When did the IIM Act 2017 come into force?

The Act, Act 33 of 2017, received the assent of the President on 31 December 2017, the day the Rajya Sabha’s passage earlier that month completed its journey through Parliament, the Lok Sabha having passed the Bill on 28 July 2017. Section 1 left commencement to notification, and the Central Government appointed 31 January 2018 as the day of commencement by notification S.O. 149(E) dated 11 January 2018. From that date the existing institutes stood incorporated as bodies corporate under Section 4, their property, staff and students stood transferred under Section 5, and the governance scheme of Boards, Academic Councils and Directors appointed under the Act replaced the society arrangements under which the institutes had operated since 1961.

Q: How many institutes does the IIM Act cover?

The Schedule to the Act as enacted listed twenty institutes, from Ahmedabad and Calcutta, founded as societies in 1961, to the institutes established in the expansion completed by 2016. The 2023 amendment added a twenty-first, by providing in Section 4(1A) that the National Institute of Industrial Engineering, Mumbai shall be called the Indian Institute of Management, Mumbai, with all the provisions of the Act applying to it. A further amendment in 2025, Act 31 of 2025, added the Indian Institute of Management Guwahati to the Schedule with effect from 1 September 2025, taking the number of institutes governed by the Act to twenty-two. Coverage matters because every governance rule in the Act, including the Visitor provisions, applies to each listed institute alike.

Q: Who nominates the Chairperson of an IIM Board after the 2023 amendment?

The Visitor. As enacted in 2017, clause (a) of Section 10(2) provided for a Chairperson, drawn from among eminent persons distinguished in industry, education, science, technology, management or public administration, to be appointed by the Board, so the Board chose its own chair. Section 4 of the amendment Act of 2023 substituted the words of that clause so that the Chairperson is to be nominated by the Visitor, the President of India. The Chairperson holds office for a term of four years under Section 12, is eligible for a second term, and chairs both the Board and the search-cum-selection committee that recommends the panel for the Director’s appointment, which gives the nomination a reach beyond the chair itself.

Q: How can an IIM director be removed from office?

Two routes exist under the amended Act, and both run through the Visitor. Under Section 16(7), the Board, with the prior approval of the Visitor, may remove a Director who has been adjudged an insolvent, convicted of an offence involving moral turpitude in the Board’s opinion, become physically or mentally incapable of acting, acquired a conflicting financial or other interest, or so abused the position or conducted himself as to render continuance in office prejudicial to the public interest; the proviso requires an order of the Board made after an enquiry in which the Director was informed of the charges and heard. Separately, Section 16(10), inserted in 2023, provides that the services of the Director may be terminated by the Visitor in such manner as may be prescribed.

Q: Who audits the accounts of an IIM?

The Comptroller and Auditor-General of India. Section 23 of the Act requires every institute to maintain accounts in the form the Central Government specifies by notification in consultation with the Comptroller and Auditor-General, and requires the accounts to be audited by the Comptroller and Auditor-General, with the certified accounts and audit report forwarded annually to the Central Government and laid before each House of Parliament. The Board also appoints internal and other auditors each year under Section 25 and maintains an Audit Committee, and the approved statement of accounts is published on the institute’s website under Section 27. This audit architecture was part of the original 2017 Act and was not altered by the amendment of 2023.

Q: What inquiry powers does the Visitor hold over an IIM?

Section 10A gives the Visitor a two-stage power. Under Section 10A(2), the Visitor may appoint one or more persons to review the work and progress of any institute and to hold inquiries into the affairs of the institute, reporting in such manner as the Visitor directs. Under Section 10A(4), on receiving such a report the Visitor may take such action and issue such directions as he considers necessary on any matter the report deals with, and the institute is bound to comply with the directions. The Board may recommend an inquiry to the Visitor against an institute not functioning in accordance with the Act, under Section 10A(3). The arrangement replaced Section 17 of the original Act, under which the Board itself initiated the inquiry, conducted by a retired judge of a High Court.

Q: Why did IIM graduates hold diplomas instead of degrees before the Act?

Because the institutes were registered societies, and a society has no power to confer degrees. Under the scheme of Indian higher education law, the conferment of degrees is reserved to universities and to institutions that an Act of Parliament empowers for the purpose. The institutes therefore awarded their own credentials: a Post Graduate Diploma in Management on the two-year programme and a fellowship on the doctoral programme. Indian employers treated the diploma as the equal of any degree, but the document was not a degree in law, and graduates seeking admission to doctoral programmes or credential recognition abroad had to establish its equivalence case by case. The IIM Act ended the position by conferring degree-granting power on the institutes directly in Section 7.

Q: Can the government fix the fees an IIM charges?

No provision of the Act gives the Central Government power to fix or approve an institute’s fees. Section 7 empowers each institute to determine, specify and receive payment of fees and other charges as it may deem fit, and Section 11(2) empowers the Board to specify by regulations the fees to be charged for courses of study and examinations. Fees are therefore set by the Board of each institute through its regulations, and the amendment of 2023 did not alter either provision. The government’s instruments in this area are indirect: it funds the institutes in part, its nominee sits on the Board, and members of Parliament criticised high fees in the amendment debate of August 2023 as shutting out poorer students, but the fee itself remains the Board’s decision.

Q: What changed for NITIE Mumbai under the 2023 amendment?

The National Institute of Industrial Engineering, Mumbai, a society registered under the Societies Registration Act, 1860 and known for industrial engineering and management education, became an Indian Institute of Management. A new Section 4(1A) provides that on and from the commencement of the amendment it shall be called the Indian Institute of Management, Mumbai and that all the provisions of the Act shall apply to it, and the Schedule was amended to add it as the twenty-first institute. The transitional provisions inserted into Section 39 carried its existing Board, Academic Council, rules and bye-laws forward until new bodies and regulations were constituted under the Act, and Section 5 was adjusted so that its staff crossed over with continuity of service.

Q: Has the 2023 IIM amendment been challenged in court?

No reported judgment rules on the validity of the amendment’s appointment provisions, and no challenge to Section 10A or to the amended Section 16 has been decided. The litigation the new scheme has produced concerns the rules made under it. In January 2024 the Delhi High Court dismissed a public interest petition challenging the November 2023 notification that prescribed stricter eligibility criteria for directors, first-class degrees at the bachelor’s and master’s level and a doctorate from a reputed institution. The Court held that stipulating a higher merit for the post could not be set aside because it restricted the talent pool, and that the petitioner had shown no discrimination contrary to Section 8 of the Act.

Q: How long does an IIM director serve?

Section 16(5) of the Act provides that the Director shall, except on account of resignation or removal, hold office for a term of five years from the date on which he enters upon his office. Section 16(6) permits the Director to resign by notice in writing addressed to the Board through the Chairperson. The term is subject to the removal power in Section 16(7) and to termination by the Visitor under Section 16(10). Section 16(8) requires the Board to begin the appointment process nine months before an anticipated vacancy on completion of tenure, and Section 16(9) provides for the senior-most willing member of the faculty to serve as Director in charge where the post falls vacant for any reason until a regular Director is appointed.

Q: How does the search-cum-selection committee for an IIM director work?

Section 16(3), as substituted by the 2023 amendment, requires the Director to be appointed out of a panel of names recommended by a search-cum-selection committee constituted by the Board. The committee consists of the Chairperson of the Board, who chairs it, one member nominated by the Visitor, and two members chosen from among eminent administrators, industrialists, educationists, scientists, technocrats and management specialists. The Board appoints from the panel with the prior approval of the Visitor, and the rules amended in November 2023 provide that the Visitor nominates one of the recommended names and may ask for fresh recommendations. As enacted in 2017, the committee had consisted of the Board’s Chairperson and three eminent members, with no nominee of any outside authority and no approval stage at all.