The NEP 2020 and Future of Masters Programmes in Management Education

Management education in India is offered as a degree by universities and as a postgraduate diploma by the All India Council for Technical Education approved stand-alone institutions. The present work focuses on the challenges of the pedagogy and curriculum adopted by the management institutions offering postgraduate-level programmes. The palpability of localised curriculum with pedagogical innovations cited in the National Education Policy 2020 are critically discussed here. The higher education institutions offering degree or postgraduate diploma in management programmes are segmented into three tiers. The daunting questions and scaling of the mid-tier institutions are the focus of this critical review.

Many of us have read the much- acclaimed Pygmalion—a play by George Bernard Shaw—where after considerable effort, Henry Higgins manages to make a flower seller—Eliza Doolittle—proficient in articulation and capable of expressing her views with clarity. Initially, it was a tall order, a challenging mandate, but eventually, Higgins, in the play, came up trumps. The throes that management education in India finds itself in is analogous to the situation that Higgins found himself in transforming the flower seller to a proficient English-speaking person.

Offering management education is a task with a multitude of responsibilities. The frontier task, however, is shaping the students to be well-suited to meet the requirements of industry at large and society in turn. To this end, educators engage in formulating and delivering a curriculum whose execution in an envisaged manner will hopefully transform students into critical thinking managers that industry clamours for. Sadly and largely, the mission of management educators to turn out well-rounded managers to grapple with the problems in industry is coming unstuck. The success that Higgins met with seems eluding in the theatre of management education with the given scenario. A glimpse at the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) statistics on management institutions will substantiate the evidence on the issues that the present article would highlight (Table 1).