Why just the IIMs? Let the government slash the costs of expensive cars, posh real estate, designer clothes, 5-star meals, high-priced shares and, best of all, our taxes to just 20 per cent and subsidise the rest to keep India shining, says Kiron Kasbekar

Kiron Kasbekar

For four decades the Indian Institutes of Management functioned autonomously, and produced great managers and consultants who made this country proud. But Murali Manohar Joshi, the Bharatiya Janata Party's human resource development minister, whose achievements include the rewriting of history books and the introduction of astrology courses in universities, not to speak of being named as a suspect in the demolition of the Babri Masjid, which resulted in unprecedented riots and killings in the country, was not happy. The IIMs must have done something inauspicious.

The ministry struck, saying that the IIMs are elitist institutions and should cater to poorer students. It slashed the IIM course fees from Rs.1.5 lakh a year to Rs.30,000 - down to a staggering 20 per cent! The cost per student at leading IIMs is actually over Rs.3.5 lakh a year, and the government already subsidises them by over Rs.2 lakh a year per student!

N R Narayana Murthy, chairman of Infosys Technologies and chairman of the board of IIM-Ahmedabad, objected. The government should use public funds elsewhere in this poor country, he argued, rather than subsidise IIM students who are anyway assured of very high salaries even before they step out of their IIM courses, and who can therefore pay for the high cost of their education.

IIM-Calcutta students got an average starting salary of over Rs.50,000 a month last year (some students got much more). That is double what their fathers earned while their sons studied at IIM-C. Naturally, banks are happy to provide educational loans to all IIM entrants to cover their fees because they are assured of their loans being repaid.

Don't worry, be happy
But what does Narayana Murthy know about business, or about business education? The government knows better. He and others have been told not to worry about other sectors of the economy; the government will take care of them.

After all, isn't India shining? The 20 per cent that IIM students will now have to pay is more important than the 80 per cent that you and I will have to spend to subsidise those students! With the government putting a shine on everything, including non-existent outlays for agriculture, we are being told to ignore the dark cloud and focus on the silver lining. If we don't agree, we may be condemned as pessimists, or worse, as lackeys of the Congress and doubters of a resurgent India. Never mind if we are the resurgent India.

It's all justified in the name of democracy and progress. What people (or at least some people, those willing to come out into the streets) want must happen; the courts don't matter; and economics is a stupid pseudo-science created by the West, which we, who invented aeroplanes and nuclear energy some four or five millennia ago, give or take a few centuries, should not ape.

Earlier it was the Congress, after Jawaharlal Nehru, which challenged common sense. Barely had the Congress, in the days of Rajiv Gandhi and then Manmohan Singh, begun to see reason and begun to behave more responsibly, when it lost power. Now the BJP is doing what the old Congress did in its worst moments - and with much greater gusto and grit.

Subsidise everything
Just consider what would happen if the HRD ministry's arguments about the IIMs - increase subsidies to the well-to-do and almost guaranteed rich in the name of the poor. Here's a list of suggestions for the government to consider.

• Slash five-star hotel prices to a fifth of their previous levels.
  
• Slash car prices to 20 per cent of their existing levels.
  
• Enable people to buy apartments in DLF, Raheja and Hiranandani complexes at 20 per cent of their current prices.
  
• Offer an 80 per cent subsidy to people importing video cameras, DVDs and other such goods when they return to India from foreign trips.
  
• Enable people to buy Levi Strauss jeans and Nike footwear at a fifth of their current exorbitant prices.
  
• Subsidise the purchase of Dimple Kapadia's designer candles and Rohit Bal's designer kurtas at a fifth of their current steep prices.
  
• And so on.

By the HRD ministry's logic, the government should be happy to subsidise the difference between the reduced prices and the original or market prices.

I am just waiting for prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's personal message to all of us on our mobile phones saying things like: "Hey, aren't you feeling good? The department of statistical juggling says that we now have an eight per cent growth rate. Why don't you go out and celebrate - go and eat a five-star meal at one-fifth the normal price?" That will really, really touch me, more than the IIM issue - I am too old to enrol in an IIM, anyway.

I am sure that, unlike the IIM students who objected to the cut in fees, the buyers of cars, the customers of five-star hotels, the acquirers of real estate, the importers of electronic gizmos, the dressers in American jeans and hi-funda footwear, and the consumers of designer candles and kurtas will all be thrilled. They will vote the NDA in for another term.

Aren't these suggestions ridiculous? They are not, if you go by Mr Joshi's reasoning, since the entire purpose of getting an IIM education is to find lucrative jobs, so that it becomes possible to do things like buy fancy flats, don designer clothes, and drive down in expensive cars with the latest electronic gizmos to five-star hotels and sit down to expensive meals washed down with wines whose import from Italy or France the government has already made easier and cheaper.

Let everybody have a share
And here's the best suggestion - if the NDA government implements this suggestion, it may well assure itself of power for decades - let people buy shares in the stock market at one-fifth their market price, and let the government subsidise the difference. No other suggestion will improve the "feel-good factor" like this one.

If it makes sense to slash IIM fees, why not implement this logic on a grand scale? Why should only the Uday Kotaks and Hemendra Kotharis own shares? More people should have access to shares. Let people become richer faster without having to go through the IIM grind. After all, isn't that the entire purpose of going through the difficult IIM entrance tests, and spending two hard years studying - to make more money?

The enthusiastic public will be fully behind the NDA government in New Delhi, which has painted a multi-hundred-crore shiny silver lining on the cloud that is much of India. After all, whether it knows it or not, it will be paying for this silver lining.

But don't listen to those 'leftist-progressive' or 'secular' intellectuals, and certainly not to economists, who say that all these subsidies will have to come from your pocket and mine, via taxes. We can now cross our fingers and hope the government will allow us to pay only a fifth of our tax dues, and subsidise the rest!