While India is one of the largest management education destinations in the world, the sector is facing many challenges. Lack of trained management faculty is often discussed as the root cause of its many ills, however little has been done at the national level by various stakeholders.
IIM Lucknow, the fourth of the twenty IIMs in the country, has taken a bold step in this direction. IIM Lucknow is setting up a National Management Faculty Development Center to train and equip faculty for 3,500 B-schools in India. MBAUniverse.com interviewed Dr Ajit Prasad, Director, IIM Lucknow, who has conceptualized the Centre as an independent, collaborative initiative for benefit of management education ecosystem in India. Edited excerpts of the interview follow:
You are setting up the National Management Faculty Development Centre at IIM Lucknow. What is the rationale behind this initiative?
As is well known, post the liberalization of Indian economy, management education in India has expanded rapidly in last two decades. The number of MBA program in India is more than 3500, making India one of the largest management education markets in the world. However, in last 5-6 years, there has been a crisis of quality, which has been eroding the credibility of this important sector. According to surveys, MBA employability is low which is making employers unsatisfied. This is not because Indian management education lacks physical or financial resources, but because there is a dearth of good faculty that can effectively teach, and also create new knowledge through research.
What’s important to note is that the challenge of finding good faculty is across the spectrum, and is not just restricted to the middle or the bottom tier B-schools. IIMs and other top B-school too face shortage of good faculty. For example, at IIM Lucknow, we recently advertised for faculty positions. While more than thousand candidates applied, for lack of quality we could shortlist only a handful.
Given this situation, I think there is a need for a bigger, national and sustained movement in the direction of management faculty development. With guidance from HRD Ministry, and enthusiastic support from our Board of Governors of IIM Lucknow, we are setting up the National Management Faculty Development Centre. I hope and I am sure that this Centre will ease the shortage of trained faculty in coming years.
Could you tell us more about vision for NMFDC…
National Management Faculty Development Centre will be based at the IIM Lucknow’s Noida Campus. It would be positioned as a high quality capacity building center to create a pool of faculty for management institutions in the country.
While there are a few management faculty development programs in the country, the duration of most of these programs is short term. They are run during a few months in a year, and the total participants enrolled are a few. We need an initiative that can offer an entire range of courses, both short term and long term, and on all key aspects of management educators training for today’s times.
Management education has made a positive impact on Indian business, economy and society, but a lot more is possible. Having a large number of well equipped faculty is the most important building block.
So, NMFDC will be a collaborative forum of national and international institutions and resource persons to help meet these challenges and opportunities.
What’s the rationale for setting up this Centre at the Noida campus of IIM Lucknow?
I believe that the Noida Campus of IIM Lucknow is ideally suited to establish NMFDC. Let me start with the obvious advantage of location and operational logistics. The campus is located in Delhi NCR and is very well connected to all parts of the country, and also internationally. This will help in attracting the best educators and resource persons and also diverse participants from all parts of India.
The other critical advantage is that Delhi NCR is the hub of Business and Policy-making. NCR is the head-quarter of top MNCs like Indian companies like Airtel, Maruti Suzuki, Hero Group and many more. All policy making bodies like Niti Ayoog, CII and FICCI are head-quartered here.
This offers great opportunities to learners for accessing best minds, and organizations. We plan to leverage this fully for the benefit of our Centre, and its participants.
Finally, our Noida campus is a state of the art campus with best of intellectual and physical infrastructure. Campus has a world-class newly built Seminar Hall facility where we will house this Centre.
So is NMFDC an entity within IIM Lucknow, or a separate one?
Although initially an IIM Lucknow initiative, NMFDC aims to be a Pan IIM initiative in the long term. We are very clear that Centre is a collaborative initiative that will bring the best minds on one platform for the benefit of management education in India. To guide and contribute, Centre will invite leading management gurus and educators from all IIMs and other institutions of great repute in India and globally.
I must put this on record that IIM Lucknow Board has been very supportive of this idea, and has sanctioned a corpus of funds for setting up of this Centre. HRD Ministry has also been very supportive of the idea.
When will the Center be launched?
NMFDC is to be inaugurated formally at IIM Lucknow Noida Campus on February 18, 2017, by a senior Government functionary from the Ministry of Human Resource and Development.
Who will be key beneficiary of NMFDC?
The immediate beneficiaries would be the participants wishing to enter into a teaching and research career in management education, as well as the existing faculty members looking to strengthen their pedagogical technique and knowledge base.
Senior faculty who want to upgrade their delivery with the latest developments in emerging areas and state-of-the-art knowledge will also benefit.
In the long-term, by providing high quality faculty to the nation, I believe the Centre will benefit all stakeholders including students attending MBA programs, and the industry.
What would be the key programmes offered by NMFDC?
In the first phase, starting academic year 2017-18, NMFDC will offer a three-month fully residential Faculty Development Programme (FDP). The first programme is expected to begin in April, 2017. Next FDP is schedule for October 2017. These FDPs will be followed by domain specific programmes in cutting edge emerging areas.
In the second phase, starting from 2018-19, NMFDC would begin its flagship One Year National Management Faculty Programme. This will be a unique long-term program that will make management teaching aspirational to bright students at good institutions, and also for working executives who may wish to make a career switch.
Before we close this interview, since you joined as Director in November 2015, how is the progress? What is the distinctiveness of IIM Lucknow in today’s highly competitive environment?
In last year or so, IIM Lucknow has taken many new initiatives to strengthen its position as a premier IIM and destination for management education in India. In addition to running its two campuses in Lucknow and Noida, IIM Lucknow is mentoring 2 IIMs - IIM Sirmaur and IIM Jammu. Both new IIMs are supported by IIM Lucknow with leadership, faculty and other resources.
Regarding your question on uniqueness, while IIM Ahmedabad was known for its excellence in General Management, IIM Bangalore is pioneer in the Public Policy space, and IIM Calcutta is known for its excellence on Quantitative area, we want IIM Lucknow to be known and respected for its Theoretical Rigor. The founding fathers of IIM Lucknow wanted this place to be best known for its conceptual and theoretical rigour. I want to bring back the focus on theoretical rigor here.
Related Article
Maruti Suzuki top executive offers management lessons at IIM Lucknow Noida campus
IIM Lucknow's first batch of IPMX completes innovative industry projects
Stay tuned to MBAUniverse.com for more updates on IIM Lucknow-NMFDC
