THE UNION minister for human resource development's election-eve decision to slash Indian Institute of Management (IIM) fees by a third has created a storm. The most vocal lot are the faculty and management of the premier schools, and industry captains, who employ their products. The reaction from the minister and his party collegues is expectedly holier: the poor must get access to specialised higher education! Can anyone deny that? Critics have attributed a conspiracy motive: its autonomy ended, the IIMs will now depend on state funds. An acceptable argument in the current Indian scenario, indeed!

The minister has taken refuge in the recommendations of the U R Rao panel, set up to look into the state of the country's technical education. But a look at the panel's analysis shows that in fact, reduction of IIM fees was a miniscule agenda. This immediately raises doubts about the government's intention. The report is mostly critical of engineering and medical education. It points out that an annual growth of 15 per cent of engineers is absolutely unsustainable for even a GDP growth of 8 per cent. It is another matter that the current education system only creates job seekers, not imaginative job creators! In fact, high investment in technical education pushes graduates to flock to only