First woman to helm IIM among 10 new heads

NEW DELHI : The government appointed on Friday directors for 10 IIMs, including Neelu Rohmetra, who becomes the first woman to head one of the country’s premier business schools.

Out of 20 IIMs in the country, as many as 13 were functioning for months without a full-time director, forcing the government to fill the vacancies at the earliest. The matter was raised in Parliament too.

G Raghuram will be the director of Indian Institute of Management (IIM) in Bangalore. He was a faculty member at IIMAhmedabad since 1985 and dean (faculty) from September 2013 to December 2015.

At present, he is chairperson of the Public Systems Group (PSG) at IIM-Ahmedabad. Set up in October 1975, the PSG is an interdisciplinary group that focuses on knowledge linked to the public sphere.

Prior to her appointment as head of the IIM-Sirmaur in Himachal Pradesh, Rohmetra was director, the Business School, and founder director of the International Centre for Cross-Cultural Research and Human Resource Management (ICCCR & HRM), at University of Jammu.

She has more than two decades of experience in teaching and management research.

Shailendra Singh and Dheeraj Sharma were appointed heads of the IIMs in Ranchi and Rohtak, and Bharat Bhasker will be the new director of IIM-Raipur.

Sambalpur and Nagpur IIMs will be under Mahadeo Prasad Jaiswal and LS Murty, while Ganesan Kannabiran will be the director of IIM-Bodhgaya. Chandrasekhar Mylavarapu and Bhimaraya Metri will head the institutes in Vishakapatnam andiTiruchirappalli.

These names were approved by the appointments committee of cabinet, which was headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The new directors’ tenure will be for a period of five years, or until they turn 65.