The return of Debashis Chatterjee as director of the Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode (IIM-K) for the second time is expected to affirm the development goals he had set during his earlier tenure of 2009-2014.
His five-year tenure was marked with several development programmes, including admission of more than 50% women in the postgraduate programme that became a trend setter among IIMs in the country. Today, the IIM-K, which held its 20th convocation in April, is a globally accredited national management institute.
However, the IIM-K lost its fifth position in the management category to the two-year postgraduate programme conducted by the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Mumbai, in the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) by the Ministry of Human Resource Development this year. It also failed to figure in the list of 100 institutions in the overall category while last year it was ranked 85th in the section.
Incidentally, the IIM-K had been running without a full-time director for nearly four years. In 2013, it was able to set up a satellite campus dedicated to Executive Education at Infopark in Kochi, in 2013. A similar one was planned at Technopark in the State capital.
The IIM-K has become the first institute to appoint its own director autonomously after the legislation of the Indian Institutes of Management Bill, 2017 on December 31. Apart from retaining its academic excellence, Prof. Chatterjee, along with the newly appointed chairman A. Vellayan, has now a daunting task to concentrate on the IIM-K’s fifth phase of development, including increasing the intake of students, improving research and development and incentives of start-up ventures.
Mr. Vellayan had already announced that the IIM-K would focus on a specified discipline on the lines of Wharton School, Kellogg School of Management, and Harvard Business School.
With the legislation taking effect, the IIM-K gets statutory powers for appointing directors and faculty members and awarding degrees.