New Delhi — In an attempt to avoid the problems faced in the planned expansion of India’s elite engineering schools, the country’s prestigious Indian Institutes of Management must be allowed to set up branches and must be given the “freedom to grow” rather than be asked to work in a “forced collaboration” with the six additional institutes the government plans to set up, according to a report by a government committee that was described yesterday in the Indian Express.

The report also called for a “tempered” expansion plan for the new management schools and suggested the schools use technology extensively.

The committee — comprising directors of two existing management schools and a director of the Indian Institute of Technology — was convened by the ministry in charge of higher education to figure out how the new management schools should be set up, after directors of the existing schools showed a reluctance to help do so.

The decision to open more management schools is part of a larger government strategy to spend billions of dollars to expand the country’s relatively small and underfinanced higher-education system. Last July, India nearly doubled the number of its elite engineering schools, and all six of the new ones are being helped by an existing school. The new schools lack staffs, faculties, and campuses, and their students are being taught at the older schools or at temporary sites.

The ministry wants to duplicate that model for the new management schools, but the committee rejected the idea, citing limited faculty and other resources. “IIM’s should not be viewed as institutes for mass production but as institutes that provide a benchmark in education,” an unnamed committee member told the newspaper. “So any long-term plan with aggressive expansion is not very desirable as it is bound to affect quality.”

The six existing schools have been trying, without success, to persuade the ministry to allow them to set up branches.

The committee backed that plan. “We feel that in the branch option, there will be higher motivation for existing IIM’s to develop new IIM’s with the benchmark quality standards that distinguish them as well as their own brand value will be at stake,” another committee member said. “If IIM’s set up branches, there will also be quicker transfer of skills, more integration and stabilization, and none of the teething problems that plague new institutes that are mentored.” —Shailaja Neelakantan