Nearly a year after the education ministry asked Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) to prepare and submit reservation rosters for faculty and non-teaching positions, several premier management institutes were still in the process of completing the exercise, according to official documents accessed by HT.
IIM Mumbai, which was among the institutes yet to submit its category-wise sanctioned position details to the ministry by the May meeting, separately reported high vacancies in reserved categories in its RTI response. This was despite the ministry noting that such information is “frequently sought in Parliament, often five to six times in each session. The forum discussed using post-doctoral fellowships as a way of expanding the pool of eligible candidates. The IIM forum also discussed faculty mobility between institutes. It suggested that IIMs collectively evolve a policy allowing newer institutes to temporarily engage senior faculty from older IIMs to strengthen academic delivery.
By the second meeting on May 14, 2026, the ministry said category-wise sanctioned-position details were still awaited from eight IIMs — Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Calcutta, Indore, Ranchi, Rohtak, Udaipur and Mumbai — while draft rosters were pending from 10, including Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Calcutta, Indore, Raipur, Ranchi, Rohtak, Udaipur, Nagpur and Sambalpur. There are 22 IIMs in the country. The education ministry circulated the minutes to IIMs on June 17, and HT obtained them through a Right to Information (RTI) application on September 15. The issue of reservation policies’ implementation had first been discussed at the forum’s September 23, 2025 meeting, when the ministry asked all IIMs to prepare their rosters and share them with the ministry’s nodal officer. It said 77.1% of OBC, 84% of SC and 78% of ST sanctioned faculty positions were vacant, while all sanctioned EWS positions were vacant.
At the first Coordination Forum of IIMs meeting in September 2025, officials of IIMs flagged “inherent challenges” in implementing the reservation roster, saying it was “difficult to find suitable candidates” with the required PhD in the relevant field. Under the Indian Institute of Management Act, 2017, the forum is an “advisory body”, unlike the IIT Council, whose decisions are binding on IITs. The May 2026 minutes record that ministry officials pointed out that several IIMs are yet to share category-wise sanctioned-position details while proposing “mandatory structured training” for IIM liaison officers responsible for the reservation implementation. In the meeting, then Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan also urged the directors and chairpersons of IIMs to “strengthen compliance in line with constitutional reservation provisions” and initiate the process at the newly established IIM Guwahati, located in a tribal-dominated region. “Potential candidates may be identified and initially encouraged to join the Institute as Post Doctoral Fellow (PDF), so that they can be groomed during the period of fellowship as faculty,” the minutes said. The approach, according to the document, could help “create a larger candidate pool to work as future faculty”. The minutes said newer IIMs faced a shortage of experienced and senior faculty while older institutes had a relatively larger pool.
