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.
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 to expand 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. Data obtained through RTI applications by Kiran Kumar Gowd, president of the All India OBC Students Association, provides a separate indication of the extent of vacancies in reserved faculty positions.
By the second meeting on May 14, 2026, the ministry said that 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 last month. The ministry first discussed implementing reservation policies at the forum’s September 23, 2025 meeting, when it asked all IIMs to prepare their rosters and share them with the ministry’s nodal officer. Responses from nine IIMs — Calcutta, Lucknow, Kozhikode, Amritsar, Jammu, Raipur, Sambalpur, Sirmaur and Visakhapatnam — showed that 58.6% of sanctioned OBC faculty positions, 55.9% of SC positions, 79.6% of ST positions and 77.6% of EWS positions were vacant.
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 reservation implementation. “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 minutes said newer IIMs faced a shortage of experienced and senior faculty while older institutes had a relatively larger pool.
