IIMs get their reality check: those six-figure Wall Street salaries will have to wait

Over the weekend, as Lehman Brothers went bust, Merrill Lynch was sold and the world of global high finance shook, hearts broke on Kolkata’s IIM campus. For two students of IIM-C’s Class of 2009 who had accepted pre-placement offers only a couple of weeks ago, the immediate future was suddenly a void.

“We interned at Lehman’s London office only this summer. Work was as usual, no one had any idea that trade was declining,” one of them told The Indian Express.

The student could have been speaking for hundreds of fresh graduates at Indian Institutes of Management from Kolkata to Ahmedabad, Lucknow to Bangalore. Firms like Merrill and Lehman have been among the biggest recruiters on campus, and the investment banking and financial services sector has been setting the aspirational benchmark with offers of salaries that have ranged from $120,000 to $360,000 annually.

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IIMA - Government turns the screws again to stall IIM fee hike

The Government has once again stepped in to stall the IIM fee hike, prompting the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIMA) to call for an emergency meeting of the Governing Council, its apex decision making body, on April 26. A decision to rollback the hike is expected to be taken in the meeting, top sources told The Indian Express.

The HRD Ministry appointed review committee will visit IIMA on April 25 after it has raised objections against the fee hike.

This comes almost three weeks after IIMA chairman Vijaypat Singhaniamet HRD minister Arjun Singh and got the fee hike proposal endorsed on April 2 after announcing a 20-fold increase in scholarships.

On April 4, the Ministry's higher education secretary R P Agrawal and senior officials had a meeting with the members in the Review committee for IIMs, headed by Maruti Udyog chairman RC Bhargava, where a single-page interim report was received.

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OBC quotas in, OBC well-off out

Almost three decades after the Mandal Commission report on affirmative action called for it, the Supreme Court, in a landmark ruling today, up- held the UPRs law providing 27 per cent quota for OBCs in IITs, IIMs and other Central educational institutions but said it would not apply to the "creamy layer".

Headed by Chief Justice KG Balakrishnan, the fivejudge Constitution Bench unanimously ruled in the Ashoka Kumar Thakur versus Union of lndia case that the "creamy layer" must be excluded from the socially and educationally backward classes (SEBCs) and continuance of quota under the Central Educational Institutions (Reservation in Admission) Act, 2006 should be periodically reviewed after five years.

The Bench upheld the validity of the Constitution (93rd Amendment) Act 2005, empowering the Centre to come out with the special law for OBC quota in institutions of higher learning. With today's order, reservation in these institutions will go up to 49.5 per cent.

Members of the Bench, which delivered four separate judgements, were unanimous that the 93rd Amendment and the 2006 legislation providing for the quota were "not violative of the basic structure of the Constitution".

The only divergent view was on the constitutional validity of the 93rd Amendment in the case of private unaided institutions. Four judges left the issue open since none of those institutions had approached the court. But Justice Dalveer Bhandari that "imposing reservation on unaided institutions violates the basic structure by stripping

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