Daybreak - How TISS became IIM-lite

Episode Date: December 7, 2025

Manoj Kumar Tiwari had a tough job: transform the Tata Institute of Social Sciences into something that looks more like a management school. In his two year term? Mission accomplished.TISS now uses the same entrance exam as IIMs. It's hiring faculty from business schools instead of NGOs. Management courses are in, social science programs are struggling to fill seats. Over 100 staff were laid off in 2024.This isn't just about TISS. It's part of a larger pattern where institutions like JNU and IRMA are sacrificing arts and humanities for what the "market" wants. The government's 2020 education policy is pushing universities toward self-sufficiency—which means more management, and less social work.Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Hi, this is Rohan Dharma Kumar. If you've heard any of the Ken's podcasts, you've probably heard me, my interruptions, my analogies and my contrarian takes on most topics. And you might rightly be wondering why am I interrupting this episode too. It's for a special announcement. For the last few months, I and Sita Raman Ganesh, my colleague and the Ken's deputy editor, have been working on an ambitious new podcast.

It's called Intermission. We want to tell the Sita Ramancahans, my colleague. secret sauce stories of India's greatest companies. Stories of how they were born, how they fought to survive, how they build their organizations and culture, how they managed to innovate and thrive over decades, and most importantly, how they're poised today. To do that, Sita and I have been reading books, poring over reports, going through financial statements, digging up archives, and talking to dozens of people.

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With that, back to your episode. Manoj Kumar Tiwari suffers from a very persistent neck pain. It's so bad that he actually schedules his calls around the 30 minutes of exercise his doctor prescribes. But his head is in a much better space now. That's because he is now the director of IAM Mumbai, which, according to him, is a cakework compared to his previous gig. You see, before this, Tiwari used to run TIS, or the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, as its temporary vice-chancellor.

At Tiss, he was undertaking a huge project. He was in charge of laying the groundwork that would transform India's most well-known social science institution. It's new, Afdar? Well, it's something that looks more like a management school. Now, Tess's makeover is part of a larger pattern, a pattern in which institutions of higher learning, including JNU or Javaharlal Nehru University, are increasingly forgetting about the arts and humanities. Instead, they're chasing what the market supposedly wants. And in India, you know that typically means management or engineering.

Tess was actually kind of late to this party, mainly because the education ministry had limited say in how Tiss was run before. But that flipped in 2023. Let me back up a little. TIS was founded in the 1930s. Since then, the Tata's provided most of the funding until the 60s, which was when the central government took over. Now, the Tata's continued sponsoring research until about 2014. But when the current government came to power, the fund squeeze began. This now brings us to 2003, when TIS changed hands from the Tata Trust. This change of ownership is what paved the way for Tivari's appointment. And by the time Tivari handed Tis over to his successor in 2025, he had charted the new IAM Light Path the Education Ministry had always envisioned for the institute.

For years now, TIS has been known for pioneering social science courses like social work, public health, human resource management and much more. It has traditionally followed. a field, skill and social sensitivity-based approach to teaching, even for its management courses. But now, with these new developments, it's cutting off those socially conscious roots to become more managerial. Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken. I'm your host, Richard Virgis, and every day of the week, my co-host, Niktha Sharma and I will bring you one new story that is worth understanding and worth your time.

Today is Monday, the 8th of December. Let's get into what becoming more managerial looks like. In practice, it means a few things. First, less rural immersion, more organizational economics in the syllabus. Second, fewer teachers from civil society groups while more are being recruited from IIMs. And third, more management majors and minors at the undergraduate level. My colleague at the Ken reporter Atul spoke to a visiting professor. They claimed that it seemed like dismantling.

programs were trying to mirror IIMs. Meanwhile, some of the social science courses TIS pioneered were being underfunded. Some are even on the verge of shutting down. And like we explained earlier, this IIM-like path was charted by Tiwari, who likes to describe himself as a Sarkari-Admi, in English that translates into government man, which makes him the exact type of person who the education ministry would use to remake TIS into a public university.

One of the first major changes Tivari made was how TIS admitted students. He dropped the institute's own admission test, opting for central standardized exams. Now, at TIS, management courses use the CAT or Common Admission Test, like the IIMs. Social science programs use CUET or Common University entrance test, like the Delhi University. TIS' own test called TISNET used to focus on social science programs. social sensitivity and civil society, because of course, these sensibilities were baked into the core ethos of the institution. But turns out, hiring recruiters are partial to CAT.

Tiwari told us that they rate institutions as Tier 1 or Tier 2 based on the marks students scored in the CAT. So, moving to CAT would improve job prospects for TIS students. And it would also attract more serious MBA aspirants. And it seems to have worked. In fact, this received more applications for CAT 2024 than it did previously for its own exam. But there's another effect. A visiting faculty member told us that earlier a student who wasn't good at math could still be able to get into the college.

So, a lot of social science students used to be able to join these management programs. But now that's no longer the case. Because CAT focuses on quantitative aptitude instead of qualitative. The result, over 40% of the 2025 batch now have engineering backgrounds, which is quite close to the IAM levels of 50%. That share is only expected to grow at TIS. After changing up examinations, Tivari's next step was to figure out what to do with faculty. Because of its civil society focus, TIS used to hire visiting faculty from policy shops and NGOs.

But lately, they were being recruited from the IIMs. Another visiting faculty told Arun that now new hires are mostly PhD holders or associates at different IIMs, because the aim now is to bring that IAM culture to TIS. But this attention to management teaching is coming at a cost. The neglect of the social sciences. More on this in the next segment. Replacing the TISNET with the centralized CUE was supposed to give TIS a competitive cohort of students, like CAT did. But it hasn't quite worked out that way.

A TIS-Hydrabah professor said that they've seen applications to social science programs drop by up to 50%. Even the most popular courses are seeing fewer applications now. The result, departments like the one for education are struggling to fill seeds. This is not just a TIS-specific event. Several institutions that adopted CUET have seen similar drops. One likely reason is this. CVT let students apply to many universities at once.

So if they don't get their preferred choice, they take admission wherever is closer to home. Of course, the consequences are drastic. In 2024, this announced it was laying off more than a hundred people. And this was mostly field staff or contractual faculty in departments like social work. An outcry caused the Tata trust to step in with five crore rupees to extend these people's terms. but that extension expires soon in March 2026. In fact, some departments aren't even hiring anymore. A visiting faculty member said that because the gender studies and education departments haven't seen much hiring,

they are actually likely to be shut down. Even the few teachers who are being hired are being brought on limited term contracts. It's the same story across all major public institutions. What's worse is that this sort of a structure has actually ended up putting free expression under strain. No one feels confident enough talking about issues, especially since their contract has to be approved every 11 months by the vice-chancellor. These rules are even more stringent with students. In fact, the management hasn't allowed a student union election since Tiwari's appointment in 2023. It has also blacklisted alumni critical of the government, such as social activist,

Medha Patkir. At a larger level, the hasty makeover of TIS reflects a larger policy issue. The Education Ministry has been pushing institutions to introduce more industry-aligned programs since the NEP or National Education Policy launched in 2020. The aim is to put institutions in a place where they can run more self-sufficiently. This transformation went into high gear after the Tata Trust handed over control to the Education Ministry in 2023. New regulations allowed the ministry to choose the vice-chancellor, which left Tata Trust with just one representative on an eight-member governing council.

The result was a greater emphasis on self-sufficiency. Soon, self-financed digital courses, distance learning and executive courses were the norm. More market-oriented courses were also introduced in management, analytics and artificial intelligence. So what happens to the departments that aren't really getting with the program? Well, they're kind of being left to fend for themselves. For instance, legacy programs like women's studies, rural development and social work have seen cuts in funding and have been asked to generate revenue. This comes after a shift in which there was an overall reduction in government funding of higher education. Since 2017, India has shifted to a loan-based funding.

model. Earlier, it used to be a grant-based model. Now, universities must find their own way to repay their interest-free loans. To address this, TIS has doubled its exam fees and tripled hostel charges over the last five years. What's interesting, though, is that the self-sustinance push seems directed mostly at social science institutions with distinct identities. In 2017, JNU used the same argument to introduce engineering and management courses. And as we reported a few months ago, the Institute of Rural Management or IRMA is also undergoing a similar dilution of its identity. Stay tuned.

Now, TIS has been left to fend for itself. It has to jump through the same hoops as other institutions of higher learning to get government funding. Which is why Tiwari made sure to get the institution reaccredited by the Central Higher Education Accreditation Body. It's called NAAC or the National Assessment and Accreditation Council. The logic behind this move? The University Grants Commission has linked funding to NAAC accreditation. A better NAAC rating means more money.

And one way to get a better rating is by rising up the Ministry's Ranking Index, NIRF or National Institutional Ranking Framework. This is currently ranked at 72. which is why centralized entrance exams help its case. A TIS Mumbai teacher told Atul that if a university is looking to improve its NIRF rankings, then CUET is a necessity. It's a criterion that gets you more scores. And at the end of the day, universities and students alike are aiming for higher scores.

The CUET also helps in another way. It brings in a wider pool of students from across the country. And diversity is also a key NIRF parameter. With all these bureaucratic hoops to jump through, no one can deny that higher education is in a frantic quest for survival. And the changes that are happening at this wouldn't be so bad if they weren't hacking away at its roots in the process. After all, this will only lead to the detriment of students and the country at large. Think about it this way. Neglecting the humanities means more graduates analysing data, but fewer graduating asking why the data is what it is.

As a Tis-Hydrabah teacher puts it, there's already an emphasis on data crunching and very little on examining issues at a deeper level. Current teaching is placing efficiency over critical thinking. There's also a fear of losing what academics call the public sphere. It's the institutional space where social problems can be discussed freely to inspire political action. So finally, TIS may still keep its name. but its character is eroding fast. Tiwari has already laid down something of a bleak new motto,

and I'm quoting here. One should never go against the market, because the market is what decides the rules. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken, India's first subscriber-focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample of our subscriber-only offerings. A full subscription offers daily long-form feature stories, newsletters, and a whole bunch of people.

premium podcasts. To subscribe, head to the ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the Ken website. Today's episode was hosted and produced by my colleague Rachel Vargis and edited by Rajiv Sien.