@ Shameerpet Clowning: I am responding to your observations since I have been helping our colleagues in spreading the word about the new Integrated Programme in Management (IPM). It is quite alright to express scepticism, but one should also consider the views of those who may see things differently.
First, let us be clear about the numbers for the 2021 intake. The CLAT Brochure specifies that the intake for the BA, LLB (Hons) programme is 144 seats and for the LL.M. programme it is 72 seats. The intake for the new BBA-MBA programme is 72 seats. So assuming that all seats are filled and the intake numbers do not change till 2025, we will have 792 law students and 360 management students on campus by AY 2025-2026. I am not sure how you jumped to the projection about the relative percentages.
Second, it is completely baseless to claim that starting this new programme will somehow undermine or dilute the delivery of the existing 5 year BA, LLB programme. For starters, the students in the new BBA-MBA programme will not compete for jobs in the corporate legal sector. In fact, the revenue stream generated by this programme will help the law students directly, most evidently by broadening the pool of fee-paying full-time students and thereby controlling the fee-structures. That has also been the experience with the 2 year MBA programme, whose collections have in fact helped NALSAR in maintaining financial stability over the last few years.
Thirdly, The Department of Management Studies (DoMS) will anchor this new programme and faculty hiring will be done in a targeted manner in accordance with the needs of the programme. Several courses in the BBA component that are related to legal subjects and the social sciences can be easily delivered by the existing faculty members. Newer hires will help us in diversifying the academic offerings, including those for elective courses directed at the BA,LLB and LLM students. We are already looking at prospective hires for areas such as Economic History, Behavioural Psychology and Statistics. So this new programme will actually enhance the available pool of faculty resources instead of curtailing it.
Fourth, the infrastructure for accommodating more students on campus is being built. There are two new hostel blocks (with 150 rooms each) which are nearing completion and will be ready for use in a few months. Once the pandemic subsides, they can accommodate 600 students over and above the existing hostel capacity for 800 students. We have already added several classrooms in recent years and more can be built as per requirements in the coming years.
In terms of the applicant pool, the UG CLAT has been getting more than 60,000 applicants in recent years, while the IPM programmes get around 35,000 applicants with some overlaps with the former. So there is sufficient interest to sustain this programme. My colleagues have shared that several hundred applications have already come in, so the programme will definitely start in AY 2021-2022.
@ Shameerpet Clowning: I just read your rejoinders. Let me try and respond to some of your concerns. Like all institutional decisions, we have had to consider both principled and practical reasons in this context. Your main argument is that starting the Integrated Programme in Management (IPM) will lead to a dilution of the BA,LLB programme and the larger institutional identity. It is difficult to agree with these arguments.
As I have already outlined earlier, additional hostel spaces are nearly complete and plans for faculty hiring are already in place. By the end of 2021, we will have 600 more slots available for accommodating students and the NALSAR Executive Council (EC) has already sanctioned 10 new teaching positions in respect of the new 5 year BBA-MBA programme. These will be over and above the existing resources that are devoted to the 5 year BA, LLB programme, which has been around for 23 years and will continue to be the main offering. NALSAR is lucky to have a 50 acre campus which can easily accommodate the expanded infrastructure and a higher number of students, which is projected to reach 1200 by AY 2025-2026.
If we consider the student experiences on campus, the presence of 350+ management students by 2025-2026 is not going to interfere with the established activities and pursuits of the law students. Even with the 2 year MBA programme having been run since 2013-2014, the range of course offerings for the BALLB and LLM students has in fact been growing every year, with a numerical majority among them being devoted to public law and socio-legal themes. If you do not believe this, I can share a semester-by-semester listing of elective courses taught between 2013-2021. There is no reason to claim that institutional resources such as availability of faculty or infrastructure will somehow be diverted away from the law programmes. If anything else, the additional revenue generated from the BBA-MBA programme will enable more investments, both in faculty hiring and campus management. As I have stated earlier, hiring full-time faculty for the core BBA-MBA subjects will definitely have spill-over benefits for the law students. The existing pool of MBA teachers has already delivered electives in areas such as financial services, accounting and organisational behaviour. These offerings will only expand with more people joining over the next 2-3 years to deliver the BBA-MBA programme.
The intake for the 5 year BA,LLB has been increased in an incremental manner over the last 6 years. To be specific, the intake was increased from 80 to 120 in AY 2014-2015, and then it went up to 144 in AY 2020-21. Since 2015, we have been running 2 sections for all the mandatory courses in the BA,LLB course. As you suggest, one option was to opt for a further increase in the BA,LLB intake, just as other NLUs have increased their intake to 180 (with 3 sections) and some private universities have gone further. On balance, we found that it would be much harder to add sufficient faculty numbers quickly enough to sustain 3-4 sections, especially since the pool of competent law teachers is quite limited and we have our own limitations in terms of the pay-scales offered as a public institution. In comparison, we have already been running a MBA programme for 8 years, and it is relatively easier to scale up the Department of Management Studies, since there is a much larger pool of people available for this field.
The larger objective of improving the institution's revenue stream is self-evident. I don't think that anyone is hiding that. Given the uncertainty about the quantum of state government grants in the coming years, it became necessary to foreground considerations of financial stability. Coming to the specific numbers, the annual fees for the BBA-MBA programme is Rs. 4.2 Lakhs (Rs. 3 Lakhs being the tuition fees), which is indeed higher than the current fees for the BA,LLB students which is around Rs. 2.8 Lakhs per annum. However, this amount is lower than what the IIMs are charging for their respective IPM programmes, which ranges between Rs. 6-7 Lakhs per annum. So NALSAR is offering a middle-range option and it is quite misleading to use phrases such as 'cash-grab'. If anything else, we will deliver a programme that will be cheaper than a vast majority of business schools in the country. We are of course pursuing other methods of increasing the institution's revenue stream, most prominently by expanding the range of distance education programmes. In AY 2020-2021, we had nearly 1,700 enrolments for the various distance education programmes. This number will hopefully grow with more diplomas being added for AY 2021-2022.
You make a very good point in terms of suggesting other options. Some of us have been talking about the possibility of offering M.A. programmes in public policy or socio-legal studies, given the emergence of such programmes at institutions such as APU, NLSIU and TISS-Mumbai over the last decade. I agree with you that such postgraduate options will have closer synergies with legal studies and might also help us in attracting research-oriented faculty members. We are actively considering these possibilities but it will require some consensus-building as well as strategic faculty hiring in the coming years. There is also the option of starting a 3 year LL.B. programme, but there are pros and cons to that as well. With our expanded hostel capacity, we will have surplus space to accommodate another 150-200 full-time students, even after accounting for the 5 intakes in the BBA-MBA programme. So the postgraduate options can be considered a few years down the line.
I guess those who studied at NALSAR during the 2000s will have stronger feelings about its brand being focused on law. However, institutions do need to change with time, especially in a context where state support for higher education is inadequate and likely to decline further. The National Education Policy of 2020 explicitly states that single-faculty institutions need to expand their range. So that overall context should be kept in mind.
First, let us be clear about the numbers for the 2021 intake. The CLAT Brochure specifies that the intake for the BA, LLB (Hons) programme is 144 seats and for the LL.M. programme it is 72 seats. The intake for the new BBA-MBA programme is 72 seats. So assuming that all seats are filled and the intake numbers do not change till 2025, we will have 792 law students and 360 management students on campus by AY 2025-2026. I am not sure how you jumped to the projection about the relative percentages.
Second, it is completely baseless to claim that starting this new programme will somehow undermine or dilute the delivery of the existing 5 year BA, LLB programme. For starters, the students in the new BBA-MBA programme will not compete for jobs in the corporate legal sector. In fact, the revenue stream generated by this programme will help the law students directly, most evidently by broadening the pool of fee-paying full-time students and thereby controlling the fee-structures. That has also been the experience with the 2 year MBA programme, whose collections have in fact helped NALSAR in maintaining financial stability over the last few years.
Thirdly, The Department of Management Studies (DoMS) will anchor this new programme and faculty hiring will be done in a targeted manner in accordance with the needs of the programme. Several courses in the BBA component that are related to legal subjects and the social sciences can be easily delivered by the existing faculty members. Newer hires will help us in diversifying the academic offerings, including those for elective courses directed at the BA,LLB and LLM students. We are already looking at prospective hires for areas such as Economic History, Behavioural Psychology and Statistics. So this new programme will actually enhance the available pool of faculty resources instead of curtailing it.
Fourth, the infrastructure for accommodating more students on campus is being built. There are two new hostel blocks (with 150 rooms each) which are nearing completion and will be ready for use in a few months. Once the pandemic subsides, they can accommodate 600 students over and above the existing hostel capacity for 800 students. We have already added several classrooms in recent years and more can be built as per requirements in the coming years.
In terms of the applicant pool, the UG CLAT has been getting more than 60,000 applicants in recent years, while the IPM programmes get around 35,000 applicants with some overlaps with the former. So there is sufficient interest to sustain this programme. My colleagues have shared that several hundred applications have already come in, so the programme will definitely start in AY 2021-2022.
I just read your rejoinders. Let me try and respond to some of your concerns. Like all institutional decisions, we have had to consider both principled and practical reasons in this context. Your main argument is that starting the Integrated Programme in Management (IPM) will lead to a dilution of the BA,LLB programme and the larger institutional identity. It is difficult to agree with these arguments.
As I have already outlined earlier, additional hostel spaces are nearly complete and plans for faculty hiring are already in place. By the end of 2021, we will have 600 more slots available for accommodating students and the NALSAR Executive Council (EC) has already sanctioned 10 new teaching positions in respect of the new 5 year BBA-MBA programme. These will be over and above the existing resources that are devoted to the 5 year BA, LLB programme, which has been around for 23 years and will continue to be the main offering. NALSAR is lucky to have a 50 acre campus which can easily accommodate the expanded infrastructure and a higher number of students, which is projected to reach 1200 by AY 2025-2026.
If we consider the student experiences on campus, the presence of 350+ management students by 2025-2026 is not going to interfere with the established activities and pursuits of the law students. Even with the 2 year MBA programme having been run since 2013-2014, the range of course offerings for the BALLB and LLM students has in fact been growing every year, with a numerical majority among them being devoted to public law and socio-legal themes. If you do not believe this, I can share a semester-by-semester listing of elective courses taught between 2013-2021. There is no reason to claim that institutional resources such as availability of faculty or infrastructure will somehow be diverted away from the law programmes. If anything else, the additional revenue generated from the BBA-MBA programme will enable more investments, both in faculty hiring and campus management. As I have stated earlier, hiring full-time faculty for the core BBA-MBA subjects will definitely have spill-over benefits for the law students. The existing pool of MBA teachers has already delivered electives in areas such as financial services, accounting and organisational behaviour. These offerings will only expand with more people joining over the next 2-3 years to deliver the BBA-MBA programme.
The intake for the 5 year BA,LLB has been increased in an incremental manner over the last 6 years. To be specific, the intake was increased from 80 to 120 in AY 2014-2015, and then it went up to 144 in AY 2020-21. Since 2015, we have been running 2 sections for all the mandatory courses in the BA,LLB course. As you suggest, one option was to opt for a further increase in the BA,LLB intake, just as other NLUs have increased their intake to 180 (with 3 sections) and some private universities have gone further. On balance, we found that it would be much harder to add sufficient faculty numbers quickly enough to sustain 3-4 sections, especially since the pool of competent law teachers is quite limited and we have our own limitations in terms of the pay-scales offered as a public institution. In comparison, we have already been running a MBA programme for 8 years, and it is relatively easier to scale up the Department of Management Studies, since there is a much larger pool of people available for this field.
The larger objective of improving the institution's revenue stream is self-evident. I don't think that anyone is hiding that. Given the uncertainty about the quantum of state government grants in the coming years, it became necessary to foreground considerations of financial stability. Coming to the specific numbers, the annual fees for the BBA-MBA programme is Rs. 4.2 Lakhs (Rs. 3 Lakhs being the tuition fees), which is indeed higher than the current fees for the BA,LLB students which is around Rs. 2.8 Lakhs per annum. However, this amount is lower than what the IIMs are charging for their respective IPM programmes, which ranges between Rs. 6-7 Lakhs per annum. So NALSAR is offering a middle-range option and it is quite misleading to use phrases such as 'cash-grab'. If anything else, we will deliver a programme that will be cheaper than a vast majority of business schools in the country. We are of course pursuing other methods of increasing the institution's revenue stream, most prominently by expanding the range of distance education programmes. In AY 2020-2021, we had nearly 1,700 enrolments for the various distance education programmes. This number will hopefully grow with more diplomas being added for AY 2021-2022.
You make a very good point in terms of suggesting other options. Some of us have been talking about the possibility of offering M.A. programmes in public policy or socio-legal studies, given the emergence of such programmes at institutions such as APU, NLSIU and TISS-Mumbai over the last decade. I agree with you that such postgraduate options will have closer synergies with legal studies and might also help us in attracting research-oriented faculty members. We are actively considering these possibilities but it will require some consensus-building as well as strategic faculty hiring in the coming years. There is also the option of starting a 3 year LL.B. programme, but there are pros and cons to that as well. With our expanded hostel capacity, we will have surplus space to accommodate another 150-200 full-time students, even after accounting for the 5 intakes in the BBA-MBA programme. So the postgraduate options can be considered a few years down the line.
I guess those who studied at NALSAR during the 2000s will have stronger feelings about its brand being focused on law. However, institutions do need to change with time, especially in a context where state support for higher education is inadequate and likely to decline further. The National Education Policy of 2020 explicitly states that single-faculty institutions need to expand their range. So that overall context should be kept in mind.