Arindam Chaudhuri: The audacity of ambition

Controversy and market changes may have prompted Arindam Chaudhuri to reorient his heavily promoted management institute but none of this has dented his unshakeable self-belief

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No one can accuse Arindam Chaudhuri of excessive modesty. An online "biography" running to more than 1,300 words bears testimony to that. The multiple descriptors under his name, a dramatic period punctuating each one, emphasises the point: "Economist. Management Guru. Author. Speaker. Transformational Leader".

Given current circumstances, here's another descriptor that can be added: Enraged Entrepreneur. A call to enquire about his "IIPM 2.0" plans and the police case that was filed on behalf of the University Grants Commission (UGC) produces a torrent of explanation in which "false allegations" and "blackmail" feature prominently.

He's furious with the media, too, for linking the police case with his dramatic plan to close all but one of Indian Institute of Planning and Management's (IIPM) campuses and replace them with technical tie-ups with other B-schools - the kernel of the IIPM 2.0 strategy. The latter was filed in December 2014, he says; the jacket ads in the Times of India announcing IIPM 2.0 appeared on May 11, 2015. He insists that UGC and the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) target him because he chose to stay out of their purview.

He also claims that a false website was created to resemble the IIPM site so that it violated a court order last year, debarring IIPM from using the terms such as BBA, MBA, Management and B-school. He says he has filed a case with the Cybercrime Bureau.

IIPM remains the most controversial of ventures under the Planman rubric that includes media properties, film making (including some that won National Awards) and the Aurobindo Chaudhuri Great Indian Dream Foundation. IIPM has attracted a welter of court cases on various issues: from claiming to confer degrees from foreign universities to offering degrees outside a territorial jurisdiction to complaints from students. Chaudhuri insists he has won every one of his cases, a claim that is difficult to verify.

Not that any of this has dimmed the effulgent prose about the institute. The link to IIPM on Chaudhuri's exhaustive, upbeat website confusingly describes IIPM as "a subdivision of Planman Consulting, a sister concern of Indian Institute of Planning & Management, the leading Indian B-school, and driven by the vision of iconic economist and management guru Prof. Arindam Chaudhuri." The next sentence, even more mystifyingly, talks about another venture: "Within a short span of time since inception, Planman Media has become a symbol of fearless, analytical, sharp and insightful journalism".

As for IIPM 2.0, the site tells you that from 2015, IIPM has "technical collaborations of knowledge sharing with various institutions in India & has stopped taking direct admissions. As a part of the technical collaboration, IIPM primarily sends its researchers and faculty to take papers in other institutions and offer its Certificate in Planning and Entrepreneurship to students in those institutions".

Which institutes? "The objective is to approach B-schools and universities that do not come within the top 15 and do not offer courses in the five areas in which IIPM has an edge and for which I will charge a premium," Chaudhuri says. These five courses are: entrepreneurship, economics, strategy, leadership and personality development.

So far, he has tied up with two institutes: Ishan Institute of Management and Technology in Greater Noida and Aurora Group of Management Institutions in Hyderabad. Both run AICTE-approved courses and will be conferred the title IIPM Centre of Excellence. The website promises more such tie-ups in Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bengaluru.

Notably, bold text on the IIMP 2.0 website says, "All students who join IIPM 2.0 will be eligible for world class placement support by Planman Consulting." But Chaudhuri insists that placement isn't the focus of the plan because "I am against commercialising education".

What is the veracity of the certificate IIPM will provide since it will not carry UGC or AICTE approval? "The veracity of a brilliant education," Chaudhuri shoots back. "You know, B-schools end up teaching you nothing. My course provides alternative education, we end up changing the lives of students." Will IIPM faculty visit these institutes or will it be a distance learning set-up? A bit of both, he says. He himself has "good expertise" in online teaching in which classes will be held live "so that I can see the face of every student and they can ask me questions".

So if IIPM isn't linked to the police case why this sudden shift? Chaudhuri says he's been thinking about it for a year and the impetus is the steadily growing oversupply of seats in business schools since 2008-9. As a result, institutes now have to incur massive expenses on marketing and advertising as well as on brick and mortar. This and the fact that distance learning will soon be the trend of the future prompted IIPM 2.0, he says.

Despite the multiple controversies over the years, Chaudhuri retains the hard-boiled home-grown chutzpah that powered him into media consciousness in the late nineties. Asked about his somewhat extreme reactions to criticism - including filing cases from obscure jurisdictions like Silchar when the parties concerned are based in Delhi or Mumbai - he insists that "when people publish lies about me I will react harshly".

The jury is still out on the falsehoods or otherwise. A long-running rivalry with Meheswar Peri, former publisher of Outlook and now publisher of an education magazine called Careers 360, festers over rankings in the former in 2005 and articles about IIPM in the latter.

Another with writer Mumbai-based Rashmi Bansal who challenged claims IIPM made in its advertisement degenerated into an online sleaze-fest with several IIPM "students" accusing her of all manner of perversions that had little to do with the matter at hand (Chaudhuri: "I had 1,500 students at the time, some may have felt strongly").

That was in 2005. In 2010, Bansal say she received a notice from a civil judge in Silchar, Assam, asking her to remove the link to her article "Truth About IIPM's Tall Claims" while the matter is sub-judice. "This was the first time we were aware that a case has been filed," she says. "This case was filed in Silchar, though JAM [the online magazine that published the article] is based in Mumbai and IIPM in Delhi. To transfer the jurisdiction, we would have to appeal to the Supreme Court which was a costly exercise. In this civil case, IIPM has filed a ridiculous claim for damages of Rs 10 crore," she adds.

But one case that attracted the wrong sort of international exposure was his battle in 2011 with writer Siddhartha Deb whose book The Beautiful and The Damned profiled five Indians who represented New India. Chaudhuri's profile was less than flattering (he claims Deb made false allegations about his father's qualifications from an East German institute) and a flurry of lawsuits saw the Indian edition of the book appear minus the chapter on him. But extensive excerpts of it appeared The Caravan, so an associate of Chaudhuri filed a case in Silchar against Deb, the editors of The Caravan and Google demanding the article be withdrawn. The Caravan filed a petition in the Supreme Court challenging proceedings in Silchar. The Supreme Court stayed the trial against all parties but the case to transfer proceedings to Delhi is still to be heard.

In a way, Chaudhuri's hyperbolic self-promoted persona is an extreme version of what management gurus recommend; spot an opportunity early and leverage it for everything it is worth. He did it all - from expanding his B-school network, opening a PR and consultancy unit to working the lecture circuit with a management theory that invoked Indian philosophy. He called it "theory i", the lower case 'i' was as deliberate as the sharp suits and ponytail he sported.

He spoke in the earthy idiom that addressed the self-esteem of Indian managers, then struggling in a post-liberalisation angst of global competition. If the Americans and the Japanese could espouse management theories, why not Indians? Krishna was the ultimate management guru, he would tell rapt audiences of middle and senior executives whose companies had shelled out thousands of rupees for his talks.

Long before Narendra Modi, whom he unabashedly admires, Chaudhuri discovered the power of the slogan. "Dare to Think Beyond" is IIPM's motto, but he also ran a seminar series called "Great Indian Dream - India Can Beat America" in the early 2000s and created such brand extensions as "Trickle-Up theory", Survival of the Weakest" and "Happy Capitalism."

This kind of thing also got him a place on television as it acquired its 24X7 pressures. Every year, he would confidently present an "alternate budget" to the poorly disguised disdain of reputed economists. But formal academia was not his target anyway. He vibed with the emerging Indian, that eager, thrusting youthful demographic in a hurry to ride India post-liberalisation boom. IIPM 1.0 demonstrated some of those risks, so IIPM 2.0 may well be a bigger challenge yet.