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Launching Knowledge-Institutions of Excellence:
Learning from 50 years of Indian Experience in Institution Building.
Tushaar Shah
Abstract.
This paper is based on work done by the author on a concept and a launch process for a Water
Resource Management Institute being contemplated by the Government of Rajasthan and the
World Bank. In doing this, the main contribution of this paper is a qualitative review of some 30
Indian institutions in an attempt to bench-mark operating and launch practices that set apart High
Performing Knowledge Institutions (HPKI) from the rest. In judging whether an institution is a
HPKI, we have used three broad qualitative criteria of institutionality: [a] has the institution
survived for a long period without compromising its mission and goals; [b] is it perceived by its
environment and interested publics as having intrinsic value? and [c] has it begun to act, in some
ways, as a standard-setter, an exemplar, for other institutions in its particular field? HPKI differ
from the rest in the operating practices they use: [a] they treasure talent and engage in a constant
process of competency-building; [b] early in their life, they come up with a core portfolio of
institutionally committed offerings that define their organisation as a socio-technical system; [c]
they tend to adopt non-hierarchical, matrix-type organisation designs which promote a collegial
organisational climate; [d] their culture stresses self-regulation and openness, peer-group
accountability, creativity and innovation; [e] their overall management tends to be `light’; it also
tends to be strategic in its output, outcome and impact orientation; [f] HPKIs acquire infrastructure
appropriate to their needs, make intensive use of it, and keep it in excellent condition; [g] HPKI
tend not be acquisitive but generate the resources they need to grow from grants, fees and other
sources without compromising their mission-sanctity.
Institutions outside the HPKI club renege on many or all of these operating practices embraced by
HPKIs. Often, they do so because they suffered a problematic launch. HPKI founders used six
launch practices that founders of other institutions failed to adopt: [a] HPKI’s are typically
launched with a bold concept backed by enormous entrepreneurial energy, talent, commitment,
foresight and imagination of the founders; [b] HPKIs were launched along with an interested,
respected and self-perpetuating Governance Structure that provides it the stewardship it needs and
acts as the custodian of its governing ideas of purpose; [c] the launch process ensures that the
nature and basis of its relationships with strategic organisations in its environment are based on
autonomy, equality and mutual collaboration rather than on hierarchy and/or dependency; [d]
Enduring traditions of high-quality operating leadership are established during the launch of HPKI;
finding the operating leader is the prime responsibility of the Board through an open search for an
individual most suited to fill the bill; [e] HPKI-founders engage in far-sighted thinking during the
launch on future self-sustainability while guarding its autonomy and mission-sanctity; and [f] HPKI
launch years are managed suavely. Depending upon the competence, commitment and foresight
the founders bring to bear on the launch process, --which includes crucial things done between the
point when the decision to create a new institution is taken and the point when the institution begins
to function in its normal routine--institutions tend to get slotted in different `trajectories’ of
performance. While decline from a high to low trajectory is common, the opposite is rare. The
paper argues that launching a new institution through correct launch practices increases its
potential to be a HPKI; and for a poorly launched institution, often the best, though difficult, course
is of a careful re-launch.
I. Introduction
This paper is based on a report prepared for the Government of Rajasthan and the World
Bank conceptualising a `knowledge institution’ designed to serve as an intellectual resource
center for Rajasthan’s water resources sector. We have used the term `knowledge institution’
broadly to describe an organisation usefully engaged in acquiring, creating, imparting and
applying knowledge to address pressing needs of the society; and its value is determined by
the quality and scale of its contribution in addressing social needs. Depending upon their
design and focus, different knowledge institutions lay different emphases on these four
knowledge-related tasks.
In India, as in most developing countries, governments at different levels have been the
principal promoters and creators of knowledge institutions; and international donor support
has been instrumental in many such promotional ventures. And yet, the history of Indian
experience in creating such institutions has been replete with examples of institutions that,
years later, fell far short of the expectations of their founders, and/or failed to play any
significant role in their domains. Many such ventures declined to mediocrity as soon as they
were born; some others followed suit as soon as donor support was discontinued. Lay
observers however, commonly believe that `knowledge institutions’ decline because of
resource crunch; but experience shows that often, institutions seem to face resource crunch
because they are mediocre; similarly, prevailing leadership—both at board as well as
operating levels is commonly blamed; but closer scrutiny suggests that often the seeds of
poor governance and indifferent operating leadership of an institution were sown in the
institution’s birth-process itself. And if the Indian experience is any guide, it seems extremely
difficult later to correct these `birth-defects’ and pitchfork the institution to a significantly
higher trajectory of performance on a sustainable basis.
The paper is organised into four sections. In section II, we review the experience of some 30
Indian knowledge institutions and identify best management practices in seven different
areas; and in section III, we discuss the best ‘launch practices’ that seem to decisively shape
the character of the institution years later. In section IV, we outline and evaluate three launch
models that have been extensively used to establish knowledge institutions in India and
explore how different launch practices lead to different outcomes.
II. First Order Bench-marking:
Best Operative Practices.
Drawing Lessons from Existing Institutions.
A basic lesson from the Indian experience in building institutions is that it is one thing to
envision a great institution; it is quite a different thing to realise the vision. To explore how
best to build knowledge-institutions of excellence, we analysed some 30 Indian institutions
from various fields (physics, social science, management, water resources, forestry, and so
on) and dealing with various levels of complexity (training to low-level functionaries to
research in plasma physics). The institutions covered in our review were drawn mostly from
Rajasthan and Gujarat, but also elsewhere in the country (such as Participatory Research in
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Asia (PRIA), Center for Science and Environment (CSE), Delhi and (Center for Electronics
Design and Technology (CEDT), at the Indian Institute of Science at Bangalore). In addition
to all these, visits were made to over a dozen or so institutions in Rajasthan and Gujarat—
operating in a wide variety of fields-- specifically to draw relevant lessons in evolving the
concept of the Institute.1 The challenge was to explore, based on such a review, a process for
creating it so that it has the best chance of realising the vision outlined in the last section. The
focus of our review of the experience of 30 Indian institutions then is on surfacing the
Operative Pre-conditions that set apart High-Performing Knowledge Institutions (HPKI)
from the rest.
There are no doubt major issues in comparison amongst institutions.2 Even so, by taking
recourse to methodological eclecticism, it seems possible to identify broad patterns and draw
some general lessons. Many organisations create, acquire, impart or use knowledge; but not
all of them will be called institutions. The literature on institution building draws a sharp and
useful distinction between organisation and institution. According to Easman and Blaise
(1963), for instance, institutions are ‘organisations which incorporate, foster and protect
normative relationship and action patterns and perform functions and services that are valued
in the environment.’. Selznic considers an ‘organisation as an expendable instrument for
mobilising and directing human energies and resources’ but an institution to be ‘more nearly
a product of social needs and pressures, a responsive adaptive organism.’ According to
Perlmutter (1965), then, every organisation is an institution provided it is characterised by
three attributes: [a] Its functions and services are related to society’s commonly agreed
requirements as tested by its adaptability over time to human needs and values; [b] Its
internal structures embody and protect commonly held norms and values of the society to
which it is related; and [c] Its achievements over time have included influencing the
environment in positive ways, as, for example, through the values it creates and makes
available to other institutions which are linked to it. Similarly, according to Easman and
Blaise (1963), the test of whether an organisation has become an institution are: [a] if it
survives; [b] it is viewed by the environment as having ‘intrinsic value’; and [c] specific
relationships and action patterns embodied in it have become normative for other social units.
Following Esman and Blaise one can gauge the degree of institution building success with
respect to a particular institution by asking questions such as: has it survived on the strength
of its contribution? has it gained genuine autonomy? does its environment—particularly, its
publics and stake-holders--recognise it as having intrinsic value? what is the quality and scale
of positive influence it has exercised in its environment? what has been the spread-effect of
its activities?
Even among institutions which have done well in terms of the `institutionality’ criteria,
there are wide variations and the best among them are classified as High Performing
Knowledge Institution (HPKI). All these have already become widely recognised within and
outside the country as significant institutions in their respective playing fields.3
On the rest of the institutionality continuum, we find a great variety; some which are close to
being in the high-performing class; but there also are many other state and national level
training and research organisations that can hardly be called institutions; these suffer from
different degrees of expendability in the perspective of most of their stake-holders. While
these operate at differing levels of activity, there is little evidence to show that their activity
makes much difference to their clients or to society.
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Box 1:
Operative Practices in High and Low-Performing Institutions.
Area Operative Practices in HPKI
Class
Operative Practices in the Rest of
the Institutions
1.a Faculty Selection Procedure Open search; merit and suitability-
based;
Deputation from Deptts; heavy
reliance on guest faculty
1.b Accent on faculty competence
development
High and continuous Low and/or initially temporary
1.c Reward Structure and Growth Competitive in academia; merit and
time-scale based growth; substantial
non-pecuniary rewards
Linked to govt; time-scale based;
little or no linkage between
performance and rewards;
uncompetitive and limited range of
rewards;
2. Portfolio of Products and
Services
Well-defined core portfolio creates
powerful synergy; recurring feature;
involve all staff who share
responsibility for its quality and
relevance; prestige-products;
represents the core competencies of
the Institution; draw out the best in
the Institution; institutional
excellence identified with quality of
the portfolio;
Commonly, core portfolio of
recurring products/services with
joint ownership by all staff missing;
Institutional output is equal to (or
less than) sum of individual outputs;
if a core product portfolio does exist,
its indifferent quality becomes the
bane of the institution.
3. Organisation Design Relatively Flat, non-hierarchical,
matrix-type; power with
professionals; promote multi-
disciplinarity; performance oriented;
Hierarchical; bureaucratic and
authority oriented; power with
administrators; unable to adapt to
performance needs
4. Infrastructure and Support
Services
Good or excellent; well-used, well-
maintained, adapted to changing
needs
Poor, Good or Excellent; often
under-utilised and poorly
maintained;
5a. Pattern of Resource
Generation
Resource generation without goal-
displacement; Core Grants, Project
Grants and Fees
Mostly core grants; projectitis; goal-
compromise
5b. Level of Resource Availability Moderate to Plentiful Inadequate, Moderate or Plentiful.
6. Organisation culture democratic; stress on self-regulation,
creativity, excellence & internality
of locus of control
authoritarian, restrictive,
discouraging creativity and
innovation; externality of locus of
control.
7. Management and Operations Systems oriented towards
Organisational Performance and
Impact; high activity-level; sensitive
to client feedback; strategic
approach
Rule-bound, target-oriented, low
activity level; insensitive to final
impact of its work, to client
feedback;
We want to use our review of these institutions to undertake bench-marking of conditions
akin to `best practices’ commonly found in use in high-performing institutions. Our
assumption is that if we can identify common features/practices that explain their
performance, adapting these to a new institution can help it to `mimic’ the high performing
ones. Based on our review, it is our surmise that the critical differences amongst the HPKI
and other institutions can be traced to operative practices taken together in seven distinct
areas: [1] faculty selection and development; [2] portfolio of core products and services; [3]
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organisation structure and design; [4] infrastructure and support systems; [5] funding and
resource generation; [6] organisational culture; and [7] management and operating policies
(Box 1). These together represent things that HPKI seem to do differently from the rest.
Members of the HPKI class seem to adopt a uniform or coherent set of Operative Practices
in all the seven areas; and since these correspond to high performance, we bench-mark them
as best Operative Practices. In other institutions, we find best operative practices used in
some but not all areas. However, in low-performing institutions, operative practices in most
or all the areas are problematic and different from those found in HPKI class. For instance, in
low-performing institutions, inability to raise resources appears to be a common problem;
however, this inability is often the outcome of a pathology that is deeper and more complex.
These can become distinctly superior institutions only if the operative practices they deploy
in many other areas change, too.
Faculty Selection and Development
Leaders of high performing knowledge-institutions (HPKI) give high priority to talent-search;
they treasure competence and talent; and judge their own effectiveness by the criterion of the
quality of people they are able to get on-board and retain by “getting ‘em big and by making
`em big”.4 HPKI share three practices relating to the induction of professional talent: [a] they
recruit through open search and selection process; [b] they invest effort and resources in
building the competencies of their professional staff in a variety of ways and on an on-going
basis; and [c] they create pecuniary and non-pecuniary rewards that makes them competitive
in the talent market in their respective domains.
A core realisation commonly shared by high-performing knowledge-institutions is that their
professional staff are their prime capital; and that their quality, productivity, creativity and
commitment will in the long run determine the impact of the institution. Therefore, these
place extraordinary emphasis on recruiting and inducting the best talent available in their
fields. Many use stringent entry-conditions; higher level knowledge-institutions accept only
PhDs from reputed institutions at entry-level positions. Especially in the formative years—
but often, also later—high performing institutions invest heavily in building the competencies
of their faculty. IIMA sent the entire contingent of its first group of faculty to the Harvard
Business School, at that time the best in the world in the field of management education.
Around the same time, several HBS faculty also lived and taught at IIMA. Commonly, such
institutions have to operate in a highly competitive international talent market where the scale
is tilted against them. Yet they succeed in attracting world-class talent by adopting a multi-
pronged strategy: they align their salaries with the academia and try to match the best in the
country; they provide academic freedom, resources and support that professionals need to
function at their best; but above all, over the years, these institutions acquire a prestige and an
aura that attract scholars to them. Institutions that have not made to the HPKI class seldom
place the same emphasis on acquiring and investing in their human capital in the same way as
HPKI do.5
Core Portfolio of Products and Services.
A striking feature of HPKI is the core portfolio of their offerings through which the world
knows them. These offerings may include educational programmes, training products,
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research and other knowledge products. The characteristics of the core portfolio that seem
relevant are that: [a] each core product/service is an institutional commitment and imparts a
regular, recurring pattern to the institution’s work; together, the portfolio forges the main link
between the institution and its client system; [b] the faculty is built carefully to add value to
the core portfolio; [c] offering it entails co-ordinated involvement of all or most of the
institution’s faculty and staff; typically, when competently delivered, the value such core
portfolio helps the institution to create is far greater than the sum of individual contributions
of its members; [d] individual professional effort outside the core-portfolio is deeply
influenced by the core; [e] within as well as outside the institution, perceptions about the
quality, vibrancy and customer-support for the core portfolio are widely used as a mirror to
judge the well-being of the institution; and [f] the criteria used for performance assessment of
individuals as well as groups within the institution is dominated by contribution of each to the
core portfolio.
In best-known management institutes, the post-graduate management programme is generally
at the centre of the core portfolio; however, as they gain experience and credibility, most
management institutes also include recurring executive training programmes as part of their
core-portfolio. Delhi-based PRIA built a massive goodwill and prestige in South Asian
NGOs through a core portfolio that was dominated by a Training of Trainers (TOT)
Programme which offered an unusual mix of personal growth laboratory, social analysis and
management techniques in a single, exquisitely offered capsule; after doing hundreds of such
TOTs, when a fatigued PRIA phased out the programme to do other things, there was a
massive hue and cry in the NGOs which identified PRIA with the TOT, its core product.
Center for Science and Environment (CSE), Delhi led a highly successful environment-
awareness revolution in India through an entirely different portfolio of core products that
used a judicious combination of research and journalism to produce a series of Citizens’
Reports on the State of India’s Environment which had a profound impact not only within
India but throughout the world, CSE was so closely identified with these that it decided to
bring out these reports on an annual basis. Soon, it found that the institutional effort needed to
produce such a report every year can sustain a fortnightly popular magazine without much
incremental effort; so CSE added Down-to-Earth to its core portfolio which has extended the
reach of its work outside the research and academic establishments and helped it talk to the
common man and woman about the environmental issues facing him or her.
When knowledge institutions get committed to offering a core portfolio of products and
services on a regular, recurring basis, it has profound impact on these institutions as socio-
technical systems. It is a core portfolio of institutionally committed valued products and
services that transforms a bunch of independent knowledge-workers into a professional
community. Above all, a core portfolio with institution-wide ownership and responsibility
implies that the institution can not be the abode for independent researchers each working by
himself or herself; for IRMA, running a high-pressure post-graduate programme in Rural
Management means that everyone has to contribute in a manner that makes sense for the
entire programme. For CSE to put Down to Earth on the news stands every 16th day means
that everyone on the staff has to write copy by a tight deadline that fits in the editorial make-
up of each issue.
Institutions that have yet not made it to the `HPKI club’ often lack an institutionally-
committed core portfolio of products and services; when they do, the core portfolio either
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fails to attract patronage within the institution and/or outside either because the
products/services do not address the needs of the client system or because they are of
indifferent quality. In the institutions we reviewed, however, the absence of a core portfolio
of products/services was a more common syndrome in the `other class’. Institutions such as
the Jal Sewa Training Institute of the Gujarat government did have a full calendar of training
programmes; but these were generally not of a recurring nature, seldom owned widely within
the Institute and respected in the client system, and were offered in an indifferent manner
with the help of guest lecturers. In many social science research institutions, however,
absence of an institutionally committed core portfolio was a common feature; in these, few
individual researchers excelled and got visibility; but the institutions by and large failed to
harness the synergistic creativity of a well-orchestrated professional community.
Organisation Design
HPKIs tend to be notoriously unorthodox in their organisational design. Even after 18 years
of working, for example, IRMA refuses to organise its 26-strong faculty into disciplinary or
functional groups. This is the case with many medium-sized institutions. The Center for
Environment Education (CEE) has allowed its organisation design to evolve over years into
programme groups under programme co-ordinators. IIMA expects its members to belong to
more than one functional areas. HPKIs tend to eschew hierarchical reporting relationships. In
IIMA, the faculty is organised into functional areas whose chairmanship is rotated and is
commonly held by a junior member of the area. In both IIMA as well as IRMA, leadership of
key programmes too rotate and are often held by young staffers. Faculty members can
commonly belong to more than one disciplinary groups/areas; and members from different
groups/departments routinely work together as a team on research projects or training
programmes. A central top management concern is to ensure that design and structure do not
interfere with or restrict such free-wheeling work relationships and communication flows.
Depending upon their age, seniority and past performance, professionals may be in different
scales of pay; but the organisation discourages these from becoming hierarchies; and young
and the old, junior and senior amongst the professional staff are able to function as equals.
The organisation in HPKIs is designed to promote partnership rather than patriarchy.
Another key design issue is the balance between professionals and the administration and the
support system. One aspect is the allocation of power and authority; in high-performing
institutions, the design ensures that administration and support staff are organised to serve the
requirements of the professional staff and to help them function to the best of their abilities.
Another issue is the size of the professional versus support staff; in HPKIs, increasingly, the
tendency has been to farm out many of the services so that professionals—who also perform
the management roles—can spend more of their time and energies to professional pursuits. In
many low-performing institutions, support staff take over the institution which then gets run
as institution `of the staff, for the staff and by the staff’. Thus, HPKI choose organisation
designs that tend to: [a] be of matrix type; and/or have flat, non-hierarchical structure; [b]
promote and facilitate multi-disciplinary groupings and regroupings; [c] vest functional
authority in professionals rather than administrators; [d] constantly strive towards a
functional balance between professional and support staff; and [e] adapt to the performance
objectives of the institution. Their main concerns tend to be: to promote collegial, democratic
culture and suppress hierarchy, to promote cross-disciplinary interaction, to strengthen self-
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regulation by the professionals and to ensure that professionals get all the support they need
for their work.
Infrastructure
HPKI acquire adequate or even excellent infrastructure; however, many mediocre institutions
too have excellent-looking infrastructure which may be put to little effective use. In sum,
while good infrastructure is necessary to create a HPKI, infrastructure alone can by no means
make one. The best operative practices of note that we found in HPKI were: [a] they seek
infrastructure appropriate to their needs; [b] their infrastructure tends to have high utilisation
rates partly because they avoid over-building and partly because of their high activity level;
[c] they regularly invest in maintaining their infrastructure and in adapting it to their changing
needs; [d] they tend to manage their key infrastructure facilities—such as libraries,
computing centers, laboratories—with high caliber professional staff to meet variegated—and
often, complex--user demands in a satisfactory manner.
In contrast, many institutions created with a generous initial grant tend to have expensive but
often unsuitable infrastructure; they may have sprawling campuses that are fractionally
utilised. Moreover, since donor support is not available for maintaining these facilities, they
fall into disrepair as soon as the `technical collaboration’ comes to an end. Over time, such
institutions are left with huge library buildings with a tiny collection, or a huge hostel with
insignificant occupancy, plush offices for the faculty but no faculty. In contrast to this, we
came across Delhi-based PRIA (Participatory Research in Asia), a HPKI-class institution
with modest infrastructure which is so well-adapted to its high activity level that it is used to
the best effect to enhance the impact of the institution’s work.
Funding and Resource Generation
A closely related aspect is the pattern of resource generation. High-performing institutions in
our review are either able to establish a compelling case for the resources they need or are
able to generate resources they need to perform and grow in normal course of their work with
minimum compromise on their goals and the aspirations of their professional staff. A core
value cherished by the Center for Science and Environment is to never allow its donors and
supporters to influence its editorial policy; to defend this value, it has studiedly avoided
repeated offers of support from the Government which is often at the receiving end of CSE’s
writings and environmental advocacy work. Other knowledge-institutions are able to
generate the resources they need but only by working directionlessly to earn their keep or by
diluting their core mission. Low-performing organisations have little or no capacity to either
make a compelling case or to compete for resources in grant or fee-based activities. As a
result, over time, they shrink, and manage to survive somehow. Managing to survive
somehow versus surviving-in-style then is the primary difference between the HPKI and the
`other class’ in the way they mobilise resources.
HPKI are generally—though not always—able to secure adequate or even plentiful resources;
however, even mediocre institutions are often well-funded at least during a phase in their life
cycle. Like infrastructure, adequate funding is necessary but not sufficient condition. Indeed,
many HPKI have to operate at high activity level in order to survive. This is particularly true
of institutions like the EDI, Ahmedabad or PRIA, New Delhi or TERI, New Delhi which
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have little or no core funding support; and have to constantly justify the value of their work to
their resource providers. Slightly less acute is the problem of institutions like the IDS, Jaipur
or GIDR, Ahmedabad which get a portion of their core budget funded though core grants
from state government and the ICSSR. Most such ICSSR institutions however have been
facing growing funds-crunch as the ICSSR’s—and correspondingly, the matching state
government—contribution has either stagnated or declined in recent years. These then begin
to suffer from projectitis, a common condition found in knowledge-institutions when their
professional staff end up devoting the bulk of their energies running projects that earn for
their keep, and have little left to pursue issues they consider interesting and significant. This
condition is neither excessively harmful nor confined to Indian knowledge-institutions.
Several knowledge-institutions of excellence have learnt to rein in projectitis and do creative
and influential work while generating the resources they need to survive and operate, often in
style.
Resource generation in the knowledge-institutions we reviewed falls in four broad patterns:
[a] they get core support fully or mostly from the government as in the case of most scientific
institutions as also in departmentally-controlled institutions such as WALMI/IMTI, SIRDs,
Jal Sewa Training Institute of Gujarat, GLI, Ahmedabad, State Institutes of Rural
Development, and so on; [b] government grants-in-aid meet a substantial portion (60-70%)
of their core budget (that is salary and overheads) as in IDS, Jaipur; GIDR, Ahmedabad;
IIMs; [c] they have interest income from a corpus that can meet a substantial proportion (60-
70%) of their core budget, as in the case of IRMA; [d] they need to generate a substantial
portion of their core budget (60-70%) from funded projects and service fees ( such as training
programmes, etc) as in the case of EDI, Ahmedabad and PRIA, New Delhi.
Each of these has its pros and cons. However, budgetary support to knowledge-institutions
has come under increasing strain during the 1990s. Science institutions—which have strategic
significance and are least able to compete for resources in a market-like situation-- are least
affected; but other institutions like universities, IIMs and IITs are hard-hit. Many of these
have however adapted well; and have been able to encash their reputation and quality to
rapidly increase the fee-income from their programmes. These are then transforming
themselves from grant-based into fee-based organisations. Low performing knowledge-
institutions—such as universities, WALMIs, SIRDs—however have been largely incapable
of responding creatively to the challenge, and have often become pathetically dependent upon
their parent departments. In such institutions, resources available progressively decline and
barely cover salary and overheads; amongst the first to be sacrificed are core infrastructure,
such as library, computing and labs. Gradually, dejected professionals leave, and new ones
can not be attracted; and the institution gets left with clerks and ministerial staff. This is the
familiar pathology of declining knowledge institutions.
Implications are several: [a] excessive funding for infrastructure is often putting a millstone
around the neck of a new institution which later finds it beyond its capacity to maintain and
adapt it to its needs; [b] resource sufficiency seems no guarantee for high performance; if
anything, it breeds complacency and inertia; [c] moderate degree of tension about resource
generation often acts as a stimulant because it keeps up pressure on the institution to
constantly prove the value of its work; it also encourages a high activity-level; [d] excessive
tension about resource generation often causes goal displacement and may keep the
institution from achieving its full potential; [e] compared to annual budgetary support, it
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seems more cost-effective and sensible to provide an institution with a corpus or an
endowment with interest income large enough to provide stability but not so large as to
permit complacency and inertia; [f] every new knowledge-institution should be encouraged
nay, obliged—to develop and operate a portfolio of fee-based programmes which should
contribute a certain minimum proportion (say, 20-25%) of the annual budget; nothing
promotes quality and excellence more than having to sell a service or a product at a non-
trivial price. Many high performing knowledge institutions have transformed training into a
major source of resource generation; IRMA has successfully marketed a 6-week management
training to NGOs for Rs 35,000 now for over a decade; IIMs are able to generate 30-50% of
their annual expenditure from their fee income.
Organisation Culture
Amongst the most striking and distinguishing features of high-performing knowledge
institution is an organisation culture that: [a] emphasizes self-regulation by members; [b]
promotes twin accountability to professional peers and to the institution; [c] encourages
democracy, openness and high quality colleague-ship; [d] places heavy accent on creativity
and innovation. A key role that culture plays in these institutions is to establish a commonly
shared conception of professional attainment, often unwritten, that drives its members to
engage in pursuits that make the institution significant in its domain.
The conditions in which researchers excel has been a matter of great interest internationally
and continues to remain a gray area; however, it is widely accepted that these sharply differ
from normal production organisations. And one aspect that often fails to get captured
adequately in surveys is the culture of the place, impossible to quantify and yet so crucial a
part of the work place. Shaping an organisation’s culture is the most distinctive act of
leadership; many other top-management jobs can be delegated to second-rung
managers/professionals; but no one in the organisation can play the culture-building role as
powerfully as the leader can, who has a compelling need to mould the young institution to his
ideals. That is perhaps why some of the finest institution builders tend to end up focusing
all their energies on culture-building. Late Professor Ravi Matthai narrated once -
“As far as IIMA is concerned, I think the single-most important aspect was building a self-
regulating culture within the institute through building people. This means trying to build
attitudes within the institute community that would foster and sustain self-discipline. It also
means building attitudes of people outside the institute such that they expect a high degree
of self-discipline from those within. Influencing the external expectation is important
because it reinforces integrity within the institute, and it reduces pressures and procedures
and rules that would have resulted in imposed regulation. By self-regulation based on self-
discipline, I mean our capability of being able to evolve norms of behaviour regarding the
institute’s goals, tasks, cooperation in work, interpersonal relations, innovation, the use of
authority, acceptance of responsibility…” (Pareek 1994).
While early leadership is crucial, the way an institution `feels’ also depends greatly upon its
present leadership and its overall condition. In course of our review of institutions, we found
it difficult to analyse the cultures of different institutions; but aspects of each institution’s
culture spilled into our narration of the `sense’ we developed about it. In brief interaction
with them, for example, the professional staff of the Plasma Research Institute, Ahmedabad
conveyed a powerful `sense of pride, prestige and national importance’ associated with their
10
institute and their work. At the CEE, the powerful sense we got was about `creativity and the
freedom to engage in meaningful pursuits’. In PRIA, it was `the opportunity and space
available to grow under a highly respected and considerate professional leader’.
Organisational culture in high performing knowledge-institutions places a high premium on
creativity of their professional staff. Here, creativity is not used in an arty or aesthetic sense;
creativity plays a crucial role even in scientific as well as applied, problem solving research
or even in design of highly successful training or education products. Indeed, management
institutions place a great deal of emphasis on promoting creativity in managers. Creativity
here refers to the faculty possessed in human beings for integrating into a new form the facts,
impressions, or feelings which result from experience. It is the ability to make new
connections between facts or symbols for gaining new insights into the relationship between
bits of existing knowledge. Stimulating the creativity of professional staff requires a special
kind of work environment because highly creative people tend to be different in the way the
relate to their work and to their work place. Researchers have also identified various
environmental correlates of intellectual creativity6; however, a central aspect is the work-
place culture and management style. It is in these two aspects that high performing
institutions differ most markedly from the rest. Many low –performing organisations have a
tradition of authoritarian, directive leadership which is antithetical to creativity. And the
styles leaders choose often depend upon the self-confidence they experience about the level
of competency and imagination they bring to their job. When the leader is highly competent
and motivated, a participatory management style is readily preferred by him/her. When the
leader is of low competence and motivation, he is more comfortable with a laissez-faire
leadership pattern and allows drift and directionlessness; but under all circumstances, a
pattern of directive leadership—commonly found in low-performing knowledge-institutions--
is the least effective in academic groups.
Management and Operations
Even after an outstanding founding leader launches an institution in a high trajectory,
subsequent leaders need to do an adequate job of maintaining its institutionality, build upon
the base of institutional capability and adapt it to newer demands and challenges facing the
institution. Doing these requires different but equally important leadership qualities and
capacity. In dynamic high-performing institutions, impacts of variations in leadership styles
and capacities are absorbed partly through culture preservation and reinforcement. IIMA, for
instance, has undergone several leadership successions; each director since Ravi Matthai has
brought different style, strengths and approach. Yet, the cultural fabric of IIMA has remained
largely in tact; traditions of faculty governance, of faculty freedom, of group work and peer-
review, of rigour to be undergone in developing new programmes—which were formed in
early years--have sustained with reinforcement from successive leaders. And these ensure a
minimum level of quality and excellence in anything that IIMA attempts.
An aspect closely related to organisational culture is the kind of systems that are evolved by
an institution to manage its day to day affairs. The practices one finds in high-performing
knowledge-institutions are informed by the over-arching concern for achieving institutional
objectives through the creativity and performance of the professional staff. The systems that
we find in high-performing organisations reflect these over-arching concerns. Most such
institutions have some kind of systems aiming at the assessment of individual work and
11
accomplishments in a non-threatening environment; similarly, many institutions use systems
for planning individual, team and the entire institution’s work. High-performing training
institutions go to great lengths to collect feedback on their training work and use it to improve
their performance; similarly, high-performing research institutions commonly use rigorous
reviews before publishing research.
If we take a snap-shot view of a sample of institutions, then we find that HPKIs differ from
others in the way they do several things that affect their work. The question is: why is it that
so many institutions are not able to create such practices that appear so unexceptionable.
After all, there is nothing very profound about these. It does not take extensive research in
institution building to figure these out. Many of the best practices read like motherhood
statements and common-place wisdom that would come intuitively to reasonable men in
charge of institutions. And yet, so many institutions that were created with high hopes and
great vision have degenerated into epitomes of mediocrity because they fail to adopt most of
these practices. Why should this be so?
Figure 1
Launch Quality and Institutional Performance
Qualitative Performance Assessment
on Institutionality Criteria
Good
G r
10 20 30
12
good launch; good operative practices
good launch, poor operating practices
Poor Launch
Good Operating Practices
Poor Launch; Poor Operating Practices
Rare
Common
Very
Common
HPKI
One plausible explanation of why so many Indian knowledge-organisations are unable to join
the HPKI-club by choosing their best operative practices is rooted in their birth condition
(Figure 1). One might suggest that many of what today are mediocre institutions got
embroiled in a pathology of stagnation and decline soon after their birth such that they had no
chance nor the `entrepreneurial energy’ to choose and establish best operative practices
appropriate to the institution’s needs and context. In contrast, as we have alluded elsewhere,
many institutions we find in the HPKI-club today were started in a fashion that made it
possible—even necessary—for them to adopt best operative practices. The caliber and
commitment of the people who got involved in the process of their creation and building
were of an exceedingly high order; these institutions often started with such high standards
and expectations in all spheres of their working that there was little chance of a permanent
decline later.
This can not be said about a majority of `other’ knowledge-institutions in our review. If they
get an outstanding leader who can adopt some or all of the `operative practices’ we find in
HPKI, the institution may look up for a while but then decline to its low-level equilibrium
after the leader fades away. Such bouts of high-performance are thus often temporary; and it
seems that making them sustainable may require that the institution is completely relaunched
with a new design and initial process. If our analysis so far is plausible, then an important
lesson in promoting the new Institute is to ensure that it is conceived, designed and launched
right; and this implies that the promoters adapt the best `launch’ practices suitable for the
Indian conditions. In the following section, we attempt to undertake this `second-order’
bench- marking to derive what these best launch practices might be.
III. Second-order Bench-marking:
Identifying Best `Launch’ Practices.
Inductively, a review of what are high-performing knowledge-institutions in our sample
today suggests that their `launch’ was marked by careful work in six areas. In our assessment,
choosing `best practices’ in these areas might enhance substantially the probability that the
new Institute will adopt the best operative practices we identified in the last section and, in
turn, evolve into a HPKI-class institution (Figure 2).
Concept.
An intuitive lesson from the Indian experience in building knowledge-institutions is that great
institutions tend to start with great expectations. It is seldom that institutions that were started
as staff training centers of a government department grow into knowledge institutions of
excellence. With sagacious leadership and able management, they become good—or, even
excellent—staff training centers but no more7. The few great knowledge institutions that
India has were started with audacious concepts. And this, not only in terms of the resources
made available to them; in fact, India is filled with mediocre institutions that were born with
a silver spoon in their mouths, as it were. Most of India’s HPKIs were audaciously conceived
in terms of the expectations their founders had of them; experience shows that the
expectations at the time of
13
Figure 2:
Institution Building Model
founding often become self-fulfilling governing ideas of purpose that tend to drive the
institution. For Ravi Mathai, the first Director of the Indian Institute of Management, the
vision appropriate for IIMA was not to train business managers but `to be able view the
nation’s operating system as an integral whole’ and nothing less. Homi Bhabha similarly had
a grand vision for TIFR; he once wrote: ‘An institution for fundamental research should be
open to all scientists of eminence, whatever the country to which they belong..’ ‘Bhabha
wanted to create in India something much more than a scientific institute. He wanted to
establish a center for research that would radiate to the rest of the country standards as high
as any to be encountered anywhere.’ Also, ‘[Bhabha] was very keen that the finest scientists
14
`Institutionality’
of the Institution
Governanc
e Structure
Critical
Linkages
The Process
of Launch
Concept of
the
Institution
Faculty
Selection
and Devt.
Resource
generation
Org. Design &
Structure
Management &
Operating
Policy
Organisational
Culture
Infrastructure
& Support
Systems
Performance
in terms of
Institutionalit
y
Mediating Variables
Exogenou
s `Design’
Variables
Funding
&
Resource
Generatio
n
Strategy
Tradition of
Operating
Leadership
should visit India and lecture at the TIFR and among those who came at his invitation were
several Nobel Prize winners in Physics, including Professors Niels Bohr, W Pauli, P.A.M
Dirac, P.M.S Blackett and Sir John Cockcroft.’ (Lala 1984:99). Bhabha pursued his dream
with seriousness and alacrity. Amongst the first to be invited to join was Professor Kosambi,
the well-known mathematician. In April 1944, he wrote to Dr S Chandrasekhar inviting him
to join TIFR and ‘to build in time an intellectual atmosphere approaching what we knew in
places like Cambridge and Paris’.8 The founders of knowledge-institutions of excellence tend
to do them two sterling services: first, they give them a great purpose which continues to
inspire all those involved in the institution long after the founders were gone. Second, they
eschew the propensity for designing institutions to perform one or a set of tasks which seem
important at that particular point in time; they encourage thinking about institutions as
ageless creations which will mould and remould themselves to serve purposes important to
society at different stages of its evolution. When high expectations are backed by founder-
commitment and design-suavity, they tend to become self-fulfilling; when not, the institution
often declines from `sublime to ridiculous’.
Governance Structure
An important Launch Practice that HPKIs invariably follow is to ensure that they have
interested, respected, autonomous and self-perpetuating governance structure
(boards/management committees) with members drawn from a cross-section of their stake-
holder groups and interested publics. Their Boards play an important role in shaping the
operating framework of the institution as also in defining its relationship with and standing in
its environment. The Boards are often the symbol and the cause of the autonomy of these
institutions. IIHMR, Jaipur has an internationally recruited board. IRMA carefully searches
for new board members from some of the most eminent personalities in the field of
development. Plasma Research Institute at Ahmedabad, similarly, has a star-studded Board
including some of the internationally renowned Indian scientists besides senior administrators
and an industrialists, too. Many institutions—such as the IDS, Jaipur and IIHMR, Jaipur
have two-tier governance structures with a large board that meets once an year; but a smaller
sub-set of the Board that meets more frequently.9 In a majority of `other’ institutions, the
Board is often disinterested, seldom widely known and respected and never autonomous.
This is most commonly the case in institutions that function as departments of state or central
government—such as the Jal Sewa Training Institute, Gandhinagar, Rural Technology
Institute, Gandhinagar, and all WALMIs and IMTIs.
Critical Linkages
Even when created and supported by a government, HPKIs are able to carve out a
relationship with the government and other strategic organisations in their respective domains
that is supportive and nurturant of their autonomy at both operating as well as governing
levels primarily because they have interested, respected and autonomous governance
structures. Two kinds of linkages seem important in the formative years of a new institution.
One key relationship that most knowledge-institutions in India have to manage carefully is
with the government agency directly connected with it. The other is with one or more
knowledge institutions within or outside India with which many new institutions have
collaborative ties. We find three patterns of relationships with government: [a] institutions
are completely autonomous; and their relation with the government is purely client-service
15
provider type, as in the case of PRIA, IRMA, etc; [b] the institutions are promoted, supported
and governed by Government, as in the case of WALMIs and IMTIs, Jal Sewa Training
Institute of Gujarat, NIRD, Hyderabad, SIRDs in various states, etc; it matters little whether
these are departments of the government or registered as autonomous societies; and [c]
institutions are sponsored, promoted and supported by the government but have acquired an
autonomous stature and enjoy a relationship with the government that is supportive and
nurturant, e.g., IIMs and IITs, Plasma Research Institute, TIFR, Center for Environment
Education, Ahmedabad, or IDS, Jaipur.
In the first pattern, institutions often seek a meaningful relationship with the government
either by inviting administrators to serve on their boards by name (as PRIA does) or ex-
officio (as IRMA does), or both (as IDS, Jaipur does). The expectation is to benefit from the
experience and knowledge of administrators, and at times, to gain informal support in
accessing government. In the third pattern, the government is the provider of core funding;
and therefore, there is an element of control in the relationship. However, in their wisdom,
the government has placed in to the hands of an autonomous board the responsibility of
managing the institution in the best interest of the country; the boards of these institutions
hold them `in trust’ for the government. It is significant that almost all notable Indian
knowledge-institutions—the `temples of modern India-- fall in this pattern; they were
sponsored and promoted by the government; they continue to have a `parent’ department in
the government which provides them core grant-in-aid. And yet, these are autonomous
institutions in all practical senses of the term.
These are so vastly different from—and superior in terms of `institutionality’—compared to
institutions embroiled in the second pattern in which institutions sponsored and promoted by
the government function as a department, de jure or de facto. Compare, for example, the
Center for Environment Education, Ahmedabad and WALMI, Anand; in their legal status,
both are the same, being registered societies. But the similarity ends there; and it is
instructive to see how, while being within government, CEE has been able to operate as a
vibrant, autonomous institution.
The first is the design of CEE’s governance structure which is fiercely autonomous and still
enjoys the GOI’s faith in their `trusteeship’ of the institution. In a governing council of 19
members, there are only two nominees of GOI (Secretary and Financial Advisor of MoE&F)
and one nominee of GOG (Secretary, Department of Forests). The remaining 16 members
include leading individuals from different walks of life. Most importantly, the Council was
chaired by Nanubhai Amin, a Gujarat-based industrialist better known for his entrepreneurial
and promotional work in the field of non-conventional energy. The second factor has been
the balancing role played by Kartikeya Sarabhai, the CEE director who has been able to
ensure that the CEE does live up to the Center of Excellence image of the MoE&F and at the
same time to ensure also that the Center does not get caught in the quagmire of the GOI
bureaucracy. Whether some one else in the place of Mr Sarabhai would have been able to do
it or not is an open question, especially during the formative years of the Center. But now that
the CEE has established its pre-eminence, chances are that even a lesser successor might be
able to maintain the balance. The third—and an emergent—factor that explains functional
autonomy of CEE is its growing financial self-sustainability. From 90%+, the share of the
core grant-in-aid from GOI in its annual budget has now reduced to around 50%; CEE is able
to generate the remainder of its annual requirements of around Rs 4.5 crore from project
16
funding and other sources. Very nearly the same has been the story of IIMs, IITs and many
other `government’ institutions; the government helped launch them; it continues to support
them; but all these have acquired personalities independent of the government; and can now
perform as `going concerns’ playing significant role in the society.
WALMIs’ and SIRDs are in the opposite situation. The government launched these; it even
registered some (like WALMIs) as societies to create a sense of autonomy; but it never really
let go off. In case of the WALMIs, while USAID-World Bank support lasted, these had
broad-based boards with some non-government members; soon thereafter, their Boards were
reconstituted and down-sized; in effect, the role of governance got vested in a smaller
Executive Committee consisting entirely of government officials in their ex-officio
capacities. The Institutes’ director and staff got drawn from departments on deputation; and
they never managed to learn the art of transforming themselves from grant-based to fee-based
organisations. As a result, they remained perpetually dependent on the department for
funding. In states like Gujarat, with the department facing a fund-crunch, the WALMI’s
funding too got squeezed; as its future became bleak, it became more and more of a
punishment posting for senior professionals from Irrigation and Agriculture departments; but
for the army of drivers and peons hired over its life, the WALMI became a life-support
system.
Besides government, there are also other critical linkages that HPKI form at the time of
launch, essentially in the form of collaborative arrangements with well-known institutions in
the West for the purpose of developing a core group of initial faculty as also to derive inputs
to design the first set of programmes. IIMA had such a relationship with Harvard Business
School; IIHMR too has similar collaboration; IDS, Jaipur sent its entire faculty to IDS,
Sussex one by one. Initial group of WALMI faculty had benefit of a high quality
competency-development programme. This kind of arrangement has several beneficial
impacts: [a] first, they constitute an important element of a careful launch for the Institution;
[b] second, it helps the first faculty group to evolve a shared culture; [c] this is helped further
by the fact that the collaborating institution often serves the bench-marking role and if it is of
a high quality, it sets a similarly high standard for the new Institute; and [d], finally, such
collaboration, if carefully managed, results in substantial capacity building in the new
Institute faculty.
Tradition of Operating Leadership
High quality of operating leadership, especially during the formative years, is the hall-mark
of HPKI class; equally critical is the institutionalised tradition of open and careful search
overseen by the Board for suitable leaders subsequently. How these manage to get/develop
outstanding operating leadership is far from clear; what does seem clear is that the chances of
an institution getting/developing it are high if: [a] the institution has interested, respected,
autonomous board that recruits the leader through a search for appropriate leader material;
[b] the incumbent has a stable and reasonable tenure during which s/he has a broad mandate,
operational freedom, reasonable access to resources; [c] at least in the formative years, the
leader devotes her/his attention and energies to process issues of institution building.
17
The quality of operating leadership is at once the most prominent and most complex factor to
come to grips with. All HPKIs enjoy its presence most of the time and all institutions in low-
performing classes suffer from its absence most of the time. It also seems to be at once
necessary and sufficient condition for high performance; even otherwise insalient institutions
undergo spells of performance-upswings when they chance into outstanding operating
leadership.10 But institutions like IIM, Ahmedabad, IDS, Jaipur, IIHMR, Jaipur, IRMA,
Anand have been able to ensure, with different degrees of success, that over the long haul, the
institution can sustain in a high trajectory of performance despite several changes in the
operating leadership. How they do this is only partially understood; but the role of the
interested, respected and autonomous board seems crucial in this; moreover, process-
oriented leaders in the formative years establish norms of self-regulation, standards of
individual and institutional performance, and a culture of collective leadership which to
some extent prepares the institution to adapt to leadership change. The institution building
work done by late Professor Ravi Matthai so ably studied and documented by Professor Udai
Pareek is an outstanding example of this (see, Pareek 1994). But in a less celebrated manner,
early operating leaders in most high-performing institutions leave their stamp essentially
though shaping the organisational `culture’.
There seems little evidence to suggest that their education or training prepares outstanding
operating leaders to play this role well; far from it. Ravi Matthai, IIMA’s first full-time
Director had never undergone any management education nor even a day’s training in
management. Similarly, some of the best-known institution builders that India has known—
Homi Bhabha, Vikram Sarabhai, VKRV Rao, Vergese Kurien—had no formal education that
prepared them for the trail-blazing role they played in building some outstanding Indian
institutions. The same can be said also about those who have provided operating leadership to
most HPKIs. This is perhaps why each has had a different `model’ of institution building,
which they evolved intuitively and through `reflective practice’. However, there probably are
many common strands that tie these together; some we could identify are that: operating
leaders who left their stamp took their time; they viewed their leadership role as life-time’s
work, and in that spirit, gave all they had to their job; they functioned truly as `reflective
practitioners’, learning a great deal `on-the-job’; besides shaping the organisation’s
`operating culture’, they spent enormous time and energy on building and nurturing
productive relationships and critical linkages.
It is difficult to prescribe things that promoters of new institutions can do to ensure high
quality operating leadership; but it is simpler to identify things they do that ensure the
absence of such leadership. WALMI, Gujarat saw 15 directors in 12 years; IMTI, Kota saw
30; Gandhi Labour Institute at Ahmedabad has seen long spells when its directorship was
held as an additional charge; and SIRDs in many states have been run by additional-charge
holders most of their recent lives; in these, there is no question of an operating leader giving
himself enough time to leave a mark. With varying intensity, short and uncertain tenure of
the director has been the hall-mark of state government institutions. Then, few incumbents in
such institutions come as the result of a search process for suitable director material; indeed,
many come to their jobs as punishment posting. Far from doing a life-time’s work, Directors
in these institutions often want out at the first opportunity. In sum, then, operating leaders in
low-performing classes of institutions are neither interested nor generally capable of the kind
of institution building work needed to create HPKIs. The primary reason, in most cases, is the
way these institutions are designed and launched. They often lack interested, respected and
18
autonomous boards; and are commonly run as government departments. As a result, they do
not have conditions in which a potential leader would find it easy or possible to inculcate a
culture different from a government departments.
Funding and Resource Generation Strategy
It is not enough to build infrastructure for a new institution and provide it funding for initial
years in the hope that subsequently, either the government will pick up the bills or the
Institution will find some way of supporting itself. Some thinking needs to be devoted to
outlining a strategy of resource generation for the institution on an ongoing basis. This is
necessary because if, after an initial period of support, the institution is expected to be self-
supporting, then its very concept needs to be designed accordingly; moreover, during the
initial honeymoon period, the Institute needs to focus its energies on developing capacities
for resource generation.
The demerits of leaving a new Institution to budgetary support from government are obvious
from our review. State governments have in recent years become increasingly strapped for
funds; and training and research institutions in the government sector are generally the first to
suffer budget cuts. Central government institutions—such as NIAM, Jaipur, NIRD,
Hyderabad and LBSNAA, Mussourie seem better off in terms of budgetary and other
support; however, they all have other problems of governmental control. Only scientific
institutions of strategic importance—such as TIFR, Plasma Research Institute, IISC,
Bangalore and a few such others—have depended upon budgetary support from GOI and still
retained functional autonomy. For state level institutions, then, it seems wiser to consider
innovative arrangements for funding. Some new institutions outside the government sector
seem to have useful lessons to offer in this respect. IRMA is one such. Soon after its
establishment, it was given a sizeable corpus along with norms for its use; these made sure
that IRMA could meet a substantial portion of its operating budget from corpus income on a
perpetual basis. This gave it both autonomy and stability.
The trick in financing a new Institution for excellence, then is to give it a capital grant for
infrastructure to begin with and an endowment/corpus that would provide it with the `right’
degree of financial security. Over-providing it may be as harmful as under-providing it; and
the `right’ level of funding is to assure it of 50-70% of its core funding in real terms from a
non-discretionary source for say a 15-20 year period. This done, the design of the Institute
should: [a] stipulate the manner of use of interest income from the endowment/corpus after
providing for inflation, and [b] outline the kind of training, research and consultancy work
that it can do to raise additional revenue.
Managing the Launch
The last best `launch practice’ is that the launch process itself is managed with excellence.
By `launch’ process, we mean the process beginning with the point when the decision to
establish the Institute is taken to the point where it begins to function normally in its own
infrastructure. It would include decisions like: choosing a legal entity, registration, drafting of
bye laws and Memorandum of Association and initiating procedures for getting necessary
clearances such as FCRA, income tax exemption, etc; constituting the first Board,
appointment of the first director, securing appropriate site and land for the infrastructure;
19
operationalising funding arrangements, recruitment of the first group of core professional
and support staff, initiation of collaboration with relevant institutions, development of
infrastructure and start up of activities and programmes. It is in innocuous and apparently
harmless things done during the launch process that the seeds of eventual decline are often
sown; and it is also during the launch that a HPKI gets placed in a high trajectory. It is at this
stage that traditions are created which, years later, become the source of vitality in a HPKI or
of decay in mediocre ones. And the chief lessons that our analysis has to offer in establishing
a high-quality knowledge institution are essentially about how best to manage the launch of
the new Institute.
IV. `Launching’ an Institution of Excellence:
Alternative Ways Forward.
Once a decision has been made to create a new Institute, the next step—which will have far
reaching impact on the future of the Institute—is: how to go about establishing the Institute.
From the Indian experience, there are three `launch models’ to choose from: the TIFR/IIMA
model, the IRMA/IDS and IIFM model; and the WALMI/IMTI/ NIAM model. Although
there are differences of detail among institutions within each model, we believe that each of
these represents a body of internally coherent launch practices. We briefly explore each of
these.
a. The TIFR/IIMA Model: Entrust the job to an Institution Builder.
20
Essentially, in this model, the launch of a new institution—complete with the task of
choosing and adapting the six sets of best `launch practices’—is entrusted to an outstanding
individual with high levels of entrepreneurial energy, a vision for the new institution of
excellence and a well-rounded understanding of the needs of the society that the institution is
to be built to serve. This model has been extensively used in creating some of the finest
institutions that India has.11 Many promoters of institutions of excellence in India—
especially, Tatas—believe that the best way of promoting new institutions is to build them
around outstanding individuals with vision and passion to build. In essence, the model is:
find a suitable man, back him through an eminent and supportive board, and leave it to
him/her to build the way s/he finds appropriate.
The early history of each of these institutions is a story of passion and sagacity of their
builders. TIFR, built by Homi Bhabha, is an outstanding example; it is also an outstanding
example of the chancy manner in which the seeds of some of the finest institutions in India
today were sown. As a young Indian mathematical physicist--who lectured at Cambridge and
had already made a name by enunciating the celebrated Cascade Theory of Cosmic Ray
Showers even before he was 30— Homi Bhabha came to India on a holiday in 1939 and got
stuck as the second World War started. He took up a Tata fellowship to work at IISC,
Bangalore where he began contemplating the role science can play in India’s development. In
August 1943, he wrote to J R D Tata about how `lack of proper conditions and intelligent
financial support hamper the development of science in India’; in the same letter, he also
shared with JRD Tata his dream to `build up schools comparable to those in other lands’.
Tata wrote back soon: ‘If you and/or some of your colleagues in the scientific world will put
up concrete proposals backed by a sound case...Sir Dorab Tata Trust will respond.’ Enclosing
such a proposal, Bhabha wrote in his letter, `The scheme I am now submitting to you is but
an embryo from which I hope to build up in the course of time a school of physics
comparable with the best anywhere...[and] if Tatas would decide to support an Institute such
as I propose...I am sure [it] will be supported soon from many directions and be of lasting
benefit to India.’ Tatas agreed readily and offered an initial grant of Rs 45000 which was
topped up by the Government of Bombay Presidency with Rs 25000 and GOI with Rs
10,000. Thus began the great Tata Institute of Fundamental Research; and the rest is history.12
Similarly, one has to read the story of Anand,14 of IIMA and of a family of world-class
scientific institutions in Ahmedabad to understand how extraordinarily similar, in several
respects, are the characters and the roles played by outstanding institution builders like V
Kurien, Ravi Matthai and Vikram Sarabhai to those of Dr Homi Bhabha. But the lesson from
the experience of these institutions for founding-agents is not that: if you want to truly build
an institution of excellence, the way to do it is find a suitable man to do it. The correct-but-
not-very-helpful lesson is: if you run into a man with energy and vision with an idea to build
an institution, back him up to the hilt in building the institution he wants to build rather than
asking him to build an institution that you think is needed. It may be rare indeed that the
`right’ man will also be interested in the institution you want built.
b: WALMI/NIAM Model:
The second `launch model’ is offered by a large number of training and research institutions
established by state/central governments exemplified by WALMI, Gujarat and NIAM, Jaipur.
Some key features of the `launch’ in this model are: [a] the idea for a new institute is seeded
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in the process of designing a large sectoral intervention through a collaboration between a
government and an international (usually, multilateral) donor organisation; [b] the donor
offers to fund the infrastructure and operating costs in the initial period after which the
Institution would be expected to survive with budgetary support from the Government; [c]
the `technical collaboration’ agreement is between the donor and the government; as a result,
the initiative for `launch’ falls in the lap of the government department; [c] the Institution is
started as a `Project’ for creating the infrastructure; [d] a serving (or retired) senior officer
from the department is deputed to be the Director; [e] the Secretary becomes the chairman of
the Board (if the Institute is registered as an autonomous society) or of an Executive
Committee; in either case, the Board or the EC either consist entirely of officers from
government departments lower in rank than the secretary, or is heavily dominated by ex-
officio members from government departments even if there are outside members; [f] the
Institute acquires the department hierarchy which may co-exist with a separate cadre for
academic positions; commonly, the professional staff comes from two sources; government
officers on deputation and staff recruited from the open market; [g] the new institution takes
up a programme of work which its Director and professional staff feel most comfortable with,
which typically is training for departmental staff.
Around 7-10 years down the line, in the Indian experience, this model invariably produces
institutions that share several features: [a] they tend to mirror the culture and work ethos of
their parent department; [b] they tend to be insular and suffer from crippling incapacity to
attract and retain professional talent from the market; [c] they seldom build a reputation for
creative research, innovation or advancing the frontiers of knowledge, basic or applied; [d]
their impact on their departments often remains limited precisely because they are so close
and similar to them; [e] they rarely develop capacity for resource generation either through
fee-based programmes or project grants from non-government sources; as a result, they
become hopelessly dependent on budgetary support; and [f] the level and quality of
budgetary support they receive depends upon whether they are under state or central
government, and how important and strategic they are perceived among the top levels of
administrative and political leadership.14
c: IRMA/IDS Launch Model
Between these two extremes, we have a range of `launch’ models that use many common
practices. The common aspect in all these is that they eschew governmental control although
many of them seek and build functional linkages with the government. Four sub-models seem
interesting: [a] ICSSR Institutions like the IDS, Jaipur and GIDR, Ahmedabad; [b] GOI’s
attempt to create a sectoral management institute such as the IIFM; [c] Bankers’ Institute of
Rural Development, Lucknow; and [d] Institute of Rural Management, Anand.
The core elements of this model are: [a] the institution has the legal status as a Society or a
Public Trust or both; [b] it is governed by an autonomous, interested, respected, self-
perpetuating Board typically of 11-20 members where all or a majority of members serve in
their individual capacity; government officers holding positions from which they can
contribute are often invited by name as in the IRMA board; in some others, some
Government officials also serve ex-officio but they are one or two; [c] the Bye laws of
institutions clearly specify terms of different members, rules for renomination /reappointment
and specific interests/stake-holder groups to be represented; they also specify the chairman’s
22
role and rules for succession; [d] the institution is headed by a Director/Chief Executive who
is identified through an open process of search carried out by the Board or a Search
Committee appointed by the Board and appointed because of his suitability, his qualities and
qualifications for the post; [e] the Institution appoints its professional and support staff
through an open selection process according to the criteria and rules formulated by the Board;
[f] typically, the Institution creates its infrastructure through a capital grant whose size
depends upon the eminence of the Board and the Director, whether the grant comes from a
Government or a donor, and how exciting and appealing is the `concept’ of the institution;
[g] the Institution obtains resources through budgetary support from the government, project
funding from government or other clients, fees charged for training and education
programmes, and for consultancy services, from interest on corpus/endowments, or from all
these sources; and [h] the quality of contribution these institutions make depends largely on
the mix of operative practices they adopt, as we have outlined in previous section.
Around these core launch features, there are numerous variations, each immensely
interesting. Indian Institute of Forest Management at Bhopal, for example, represents a
governmental effort to create an IIMA-like institution for the forestry sector which worked
but, in some ways, went awry. It was established by GOI’s Ministry of Environment and
Forests and the National Waste Lands Development Board as a truly autonomous institute
under the influence of Dr Kamla Chawdhry, then the chairperson of NWDB, who was also
the chairman of IIFM’s first Board. As the first Chairman of the Board, she tried to `launch’
IIFM as an institution that would have a broader appeal and ownership among NGOs,
industry, farmers, environmentalists and general public rather than being a captive institution
of the Forest Department. For its first year or two, IIMA served as the womb to develop the
embryo of the new Institution (including its first Director-designate), and give it its `genes’ as
it were. Dr Chawdhry got for the Institute a board that did have a broad representation, a
faculty that had a mix of foresters, social scientists and management specialists; she launched
a Post-graduate Programme in forest Management that reflected her multi-disciplinary
concept of the Institute and tried hard to attract a professional academic to be its first director.
However, she had to leave before the `launch’ of IIFM was complete; as a result, IIFM
emerged as a kind of an amalgam of NIAM and IIMA.
IRMA and BIRD represent another variant. Just as IIFM was promoted by the National
Wastelands Development Board as a management institute for the environment sector, both
these too were promoted by strategic organisations—National Dairy Development Board
(NDDB) and National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development—to play a significant
role in their sectors, viz., farmer co-operatives and rural credit respectively. Both NDDB as
well as NABARD followed the core launch practices in this model by the book; they created
distinguished Boards of Governors; they gave the institutes outstanding infrastructure; they
also gave them corpuses so that the Institutes could be autonomous. The chairmen of
founding organisations became the chairman of the Institute Boards, too. But, in some
respects, IRMA turned out to be one up on IIFM as well as BIRD; NDDB/IRMA chairman
insisted that NDDB control/influence over IRMA should operate only at the Board level; he
ensured that IRMA recruited her Director as well as faculty from the open market, and never
let an NDDB officer to be posted/deputed to IRMA. NABARD filled the BIRD faculty
positions with NABARD staffers on deputation; except for a brief spell, the Director was also
provided by NABARD from its senior/retired officers. Secondly, amongst the first activities
that IRMA started was a post-graduate programme which became her flag-ship programme;
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the programme ensured a steady supply of bright young students on the IRMA campus that
shaped a vibrant academic environment. BIRD kept doing short term in-service training
programmes for officers of Regional Rural Banks. However, it had no avenue for infusing
fresh-blood either in its faculty or in its trainee-population. Because of its norm of recruiting
faculty (usually with a PhD or a track record of published work) from the open market,
IRMA also developed a tradition of research which BIRD found difficult to develop, much as
its chairman dreamt of it. Neither Institute—nor, IIFM for that matter, however, can claim to
have had a major success in producing strategic change in their respective sectors.
The ICSSR Institutes—of which there are over 20 in the country--are a class apart from
IRMA/BIRD/IIFM genre. These too used the core launch practices in this model; they derive
core funding from the ICSSR and state governments, and depend on projects for the rest of
their funding. Many were founded by outstanding and highly respected social scientists--
VKRV Rao founded the Institute of Economic Growth in Delhi and Institute of Social and
Economic Change at Bangalore; K N Raj founded the Center for Development Studies at
Trivanrdum; Malcom Adiseshaiya founded the Madras Institute of Development Studies,
Dandekar led the Gokhale Institute at Pune for a long time, and D.T. Lakdawala founded
Sardar Patel Institute of Economic and Social Research and played an instrumental role in
transforming the Gujarat Institute of Area Planning started by Vimal Shah into Gujarat
Institute of Development Research. Most of the ICSSR Institutions were afflicted by `leader-
centric syndrome’; during a long spell when they were managed by outstanding senior social
scientists, they kept collecting young faculty and building them up. Many of these however
paid little attention during the `launch process’ to creating norms, traditions and systems that
would help these institutions to sustain or even enhance their vitality and impacts after them.
Moreover, after them, many of these institutes developed an invidious work culture around
unrealistic and false notions of `academic freedom’. Thoughtless recruitment-spree at clerical
and ministerial levels –often during the `launch process’ itself--left many an ICSSR
institution lugging a huge deadweight of undisciplined and unproductive support staff a few
years later. Now that many of these Institutes are 25-30 years old, a generation of aging
faculty dominate their workplaces; with growing fund-crunch, new faculty are difficult to
induct. What many of these places need most—but their leaders seem unable to catalyse—is
a process of institutional renewal with new systems and a new work culture so that they pull
themselves up by the boot-straps and start running.
Important implication we need to draw from the ICSSR family of institutions is that even
with best launch practices, there is still plenty of room for building institutions that begin at
some stage to stagnate or even decline. And the lesson is that best scientists/academics often
tend to be soft and short-sighted leaders15; and that they might evolve far-sighted launch as
well as operative practices if only they had opportunities and spaces to learn and think about
how great institutions get built. Another implication is that many institution leaders in the
ICSSR family can dramatically improve their performance just by working away on their
operative practices and move towards `world-standard’ . Unlike these, a vast corpus of
virtually defunct institutions like many WALMIs and SIRDs that developing countries like
India have will, it seems, derive very limited lasting benefit from working only on their
operating practices. A good leader can—and for short periods does—`turn around’ such
institutions. The problem is that turn around is not a suitable idiom for defunct or still-born
knowledge institutions whose problem is stagnation and lack of creative energy; there are
aspects of their design—created by faulty launch—that ceaselessly work away as if to keep
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impelling these institutions to stagnation and mediocrity. Often, there is little by way of
`institutionality’ that can be salvaged from such junk; where there is, a salvage requires
complete re-launch: wipe the slate clean—or as clean as it can get, and now try writing on it
all over again, but with greater wisdom and suavity.
End Notes:
The author acknowledges the many helpful conversations and discussions he had with Katar
Singh, Anil Shah, Rajesh Tandon, PM Singhi, Jane Covey and John Farrington. The research
support received from Mahendra Singh is gratefully acknowledged; special thanks are due to
Vishwa Ballabh for help in editing the paper for the IRMA Symposium.
1. That we have drawn lessons from sectors ranging from animal husbandry to forestry to electronics and
from fields ranging from participatory research to business management to plasma physics underlines
our basic premise that issues involved in building knowledge institutions of quality are largely generic
and have little to do with the sectors they serve. If this premise is valid, the central lessons we have
drawn are as relevant for knowledge-institution-building in one sector as in any other.
2. Such as, for example, WALMI, Gujarat with the Institute of Plasma Research, Ahmedabad or the
National Institute of Agriculture Management, Jaipur with the Indian Institute of Management,
Ahmedabad or IRMA, Anand—that vary greatly in terms of all variables that might matter; yet, the
fact still remains that over a life of 15 years, Institute of Plasma Research is a world-leader in its field
but many of the WALMIs, such as Gujarat’s, have yet to establish their intrinsic value in the eyes of
many of their stake-holders.
3. Some of these include the Indian Institute of Management at Ahmedabad, Institute of Plasma Research,
Ahmedabad, Indian Institute of Health Management Research, Jaipur, Indian Institute of Science,
Bangalore, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bombay, Centre for Environment Education,
Ahmedabad, Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), PRIA, Institute of Rural Management, Anand
(IRMA).
4. That is by the dual strategy of enticing senior professionals well-known in a relevant field as well as by
inducting young talent and helping them build professional reputations by giving them opportunities
and space.
5. There are notable exceptions. A bright spot of the USAID-World Bank supported WALMI project was
to put several batches of irrigation department staff from 10 states through an intensive faculty
development programme; but the benefit of this has been largely lost since many officers sponsored to
these programmes were not available to WALMIs.
6. Hinrich summarises the existing thinking on Social and Environmental Correlates of creativity as
follows: [a] The environment must provide the researcher the opportunity to recognise and investigate
pertinent problem areas to gain initial problem-sensitivity; and opportunities that challenge her creative
capacity and demand solution. [b] too much knowledge may often be a disadvantage; they may be
`sure’ that a particular line of attack will not work and therefore not try it. [c] a culture that insists on
conformity and adherence to established principles and received wisdom may curb problem sensitivity
and creativity. [d] frequent stimulation and encouragement by leader results in high academic
performance. [e] frequent contact with colleagues with dissimilar values and previous work experience
results in high performance; therefore the case for research teams with heterogeneous values and
backgrounds seems strong. [f] young groups tend (the age of the group and not of its members] to be
more creative than old groups; this supports the practice in many high-performing institutions for teams
and task-forces. [g] if you produce large enough quantity of ideas through group brainstorming, some
will turn out to be good; studies also show that significant proportion of good ideas tend to come from
brainstorming groups. [h] high intellectual performance is generally associated with high `science’
orientation than with high `institution’ orientation.
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7. In saying this, one by no means wants to undermine the society’s need to have excellent staff training
centers for all manner of organisations. But the capacity of even excellent training centres—which
acquire and impart knowledge—to influence social environment and produce large spread effects
would tend generally to be less compared to institutions that excel in creation and application of
knowledge.
8. George William Curtis, a man of letters who taught at Michigan visited Andrew D White, the founder
president of Cornell University in October 1858. To Curtis, “[White] unfolded to me his idea of the
great work that should be done in the great State of New York. Surely, he said, in the greatest state
there should be the greatest of universities; in Central New York, there should arise a university which
by the amplitude of its endowment and by the whole scope of its intended sphere, by the character of
the studies in the whole scope of the curriculum, should satisfy the wants of the hour. More than that,
he said, it should begin at the beginning. It should take hold of the chief interest of this country, which
is agriculture; then, it should rise, step by step, grade by grade – until it fulfilled the highest ideal of
what a university should be. It was also his intention that there should be no man, wherever he might
be – on the other side of the ocean or this – who might be a fitting teacher of men, who should not be
drawn within the sphere of this university.” Precisely ten years later, on October 1868, White founded
Cornell University (Bishop 1984).
9. Each board had its unique personality that sets it apart from others; but the experience of the HPKI in
our review will vindicate our point that interested and respected boards representing diverse stake-
holder groups are a necessary condition for a good knowledge-institutions-regardless of whether it is a
government-sponsored/supported institution (such as the CEE, Plasma Research Institute, IIM) or
otherwise (such as IRMA, EDI, Ahmedabad, PRIA, New Delhi).
10. Reasonably good eamples that come to mind are WALMI, Gujarat during the tenure of late Mr DT
Buch and IMTI, Kota under its present leadership.
11. Such as Indian Institute of Management at Ahmedabad, National Institute of Design (Ahmedabad),
Physical Research Laboratory, Plasma Research Institute, Space Application Center, Center for
Environment Education, Ahmedabad, Indian Space Research Organisation, Tata Institute of
Fundamental Research, Tata Institute of Social Science, Bombay; Tata Memorial Hospital, Bombay,
BARC, Indian Institute of Health Management Research, Jaipur, Entrepreneurship Development
Institute, Ahmedabad, and several others.
12. An excellent account of knowledge-institutions founded/supported by Sir Dorabji Tata Trust—
including Tata Institute of Social Science, Tata Memorial Hospital and Tata Institute of Fundamental
Research – can be found in Lala (1984) on which the present account is wholly based. Each is a story
of an institution built around a visionary. Of particular interest is the Tata Institute of Fundamental
Research and how an exquisite `launch’ of that institution by Homi Bhabha explains its enduring
excellence.
13. Like Bhabha, V Kurien too had chanced into Anand and built a string of great institutions including
IRMA. Like Bhabha, Kurien too wanted IRMA to symbolise and radiate excellence; so he became the
self-appointed `Site Engineer’ of the IRMA Project. Like all great institution builders, Dr Kurien chose
his own symbolic acts to launch IRMA as an institution destined for greatness. He collected some of
the most respected names in India’s world of management and social science education – Ravi Matthai,
Kamla Chawdhry, Vijay Vyas, Ramakrishnaiyya, CH Hanumantha Rao, AM Khusro and several others
– in the first Board of IRMA. He and Kamla Chawdhry invited Andrew Towl, a highly regarded
retired professor of case development from Harvard Business School to train IRMA faculty in writing
and teaching cases. He wanted for IRMA an exquisite campus, designed and built with elegance; he
exhorted IRMA to make her students think and act `big’, and ensured that they had access to the best of
facilities while in IRMA (you can’t produce Kings in a pigsty’, he was fond of saying).
14. Thus the IAS Academy at Mussourie, Police Academies, NDA, Pune, IGFRI, Dehradun – these are
excellent institutions created in this model; but these get the best of everything; these get limitless
26
resources; people who head them are the senior-most, and carefully picked officers of their respective
cadres/services; the trainees they get are the cream of society; and they commonly have elite tradition
to protect . In these terms, Water and Land Management Institutes, State Institutes of Rural
Development, Jalsewa Training Institutes tend to be on the other extreme.
15. Dr Kurien often used to tell me, `To build classy institutions, besides many other things, one also has to
be a bit of a S.O.B. True, you build institutions for people; but you cannot leave institutions for them
to hijack them for their narrow purposes.”
References:
Bishop, Moriss (1984) A History of Cornell, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Easman and Blaise (1963) “Institution Building Research: The Guiding Concepts.”.
Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh.
Hinrichs, John R (1977) Creativity in Industrial Research, in Jarome Blood [ed] The
Management of Scientific Talent, Bombay: Taraporewala Publishing Co.
Lala, R M (1984) The Heartbeat of a Trust, New Delhi: Tata McGraw-Hill Publishing Co,
Ltd
Pareek, Udai (1994) Beyond Management, New Delhi: Oxford and IBH Publishing Co.
Perlmutter, H V (1965) Towards a Theory and Practice of Social Architecture: The
Building of Indispensable Institutions’ London: Tavistock.
Selznic, P (1957) Leadership in Administration, Evanston, Illinois: Row Peterson.
List of Abbreviations.
BARC Bhabha Atomic Research Center, Trombay
BIRD Bankers’ Institute of Rural Development, Lucknow
BOT Build-Operate-Transfer
CSE Center for Science and Environment, New Delhi
CEDT Center for Electronics Design Technology, Bangalore
CEE Center for Environment Education, Ahmedabad
CIDA Canadian International Development Agency
CADA Command Area Development Authority
CAZRI Central Arid Zone Research Institute, Jodhpur
DSC Development Support Center, Ahmedabad
DG Director General
EDI Entrepreneurship Development Institute, Ahmedabad
FCRA Foreign Contribution Regulation Act
GO Government Organisation
GOG Government of Gujarat
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GOI Government of India
GOR Government of Rajasthan
GLI Gandhi Labour Institute, Ahmedabad
GIDR Gujarat Institute of Development Research, Ahmedabad
GMI Groundwater Management Institute
GAU Gujarat Agriculture University, Anand
HPKI high-Performing-Knowledge-Institutions
HBS Harvard Business School
IMTI irrigation Management Training Institute, Kota
IEC Information, Education, Communication Campaign
IDS Institute of Development Studies
IIMA Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad
IRMA Institute of Rural Management, Anand
ICSSR Indian Council of Social Science Research
IIT Indian Institute of Technology
IIHMR Indian Institute for Health Management Research, Jaipur
IISC Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore
IIFM Indian Institute of Forest Management, Bhopal
IGFRI Indira Gandhi Forest Research Institute, Dehradun
IAS Indian Administrative Service
LBSNAA Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration, Mussourie
MOE&F Ministry of Environment and Forest, New Delhi
MOA Memorandum of Association
NDA National Defense Academy, Pune
NGO Non Government Organisation
NID National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad
NIRD National Institute of Rural Development, Hyderabad
NIAM National Institute of Agricultural Marketing, Jaipur
NWDB National Wastelands Development Board, New Delhi
NDDB National Dairy Development, Board, Anand
NABARD National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development, Bombay
ODI Overseas Development Institute, London
PHED Public Health Engineering Department
PRIA Participatory Research in Asia
PRL Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad
RGWD Rajasthan Ground Water Department, Jodhpur
ROKI Rest of the Knowledge Institutions
RTI or
RTIG
Rural Technology Institute, Gandhinagar
RIPA Rajasthan Institute of Public Administration, Jaipur
RWRMI Rajasthan Water Resources Management Institute
SIRD State Institute of Rural Development
SEWA Self Employed Women’s’ Association
SPISR Sardar Patel Institute of Social and Economic Research, Ahmedabad
SIDA Swedish International Development Agency
TERI Tata Energy Research Institute, New Delhi
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TIFR Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bombay
USAID United States Agency for International Development
VC Vice Chancellor
WRCP Water Resources Consolidation Project
WWF World Wildlife Fund
WB World Bank
WUA Water User Association
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