All projects undertaken in the name of the 'people' deserve the attention of all those who care. At the current instance, the project in business focus is the HRD Minister Murli Manohar Joshi's drive to make higher education more accessible to the people at large by cutting the fees for the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs).

If you can't hear ecstatic cheers from people who expect to be India Inc's brightest managers some day, it's because they do indeed expect to be India Inc's brightest managers some day. And that means they are quality sensitive. And so, regardless of their families' current financial resources. The very reason they hold India's institutes of management (or for that matter, technology) in such high aspirational regard is that they trust their meritocratic values. Your brain gets you in-and boosts your earning capacity so dramatically, that issues of funding become irrelevant. Prove your worthiness, the money will follow.

The ministry's stated intention of giving more people the privilege of an IIM education might sound harmless. But the issue, as the top IIMs have argued, is one of principle. Though the institutes were set up by the government, they were always intended to be autonomous in their functioning, which is why they were formed under the Societies Act of 1860. Force-changing the fee structure amounts to a breach of this autonomy, at least in spirit, and validates the IIMs' fear that other changes could be demanded next. Subversion of the admission process and distortion of the curriculum, particularly, would threaten the very meritocratic quality that is so dear to so many of India's brightest students. This would be a disaster, whether it's done in the name of the 'people' or 'peepal'.

The IIMs have put up a worthy resistance. Yet, that's not the end of the story. N.R. Narayana Murthy, co-founder of Infosys and Chairman of IIM Ahmedabad's Board of Governors, has acknowledged the institutes as being "a child of the government". He has also asked for an "open mind" on the stand-off.

Indeed, the institutes were set up in the 1960s as part of Jawaharlal Nehru's vision of centrally planned development. Apart from public investment in heavy industry and other mega-projects with gestations too long for private investors, this vision involved openness to the world's ideas and global collaborations in all spheres of intellect. The pioneering IIMs and IITs started off as foreign joint ventures in all but name-as per Nehru's long-term strategy of developing an edge in higher-education for practical Indian application. In hr terms, India needed engineers and managers with a 'scientific temper' who could be at the world's cutting edge of progress.

It worked. India can actually claim to be a 'brainbox to the world' without inviting sniggers. Except that central planning is long gone. It has outlived its utility, and the lead role in the country's economic future is in the process of being turned over to the market. The privatisation of PSUs, for the sake of prosperity based on market efficiency, is part of this important transition.

For many decades now, the IIMs have been doing a good job of turning out private sector managers, and it's about time India aligned the institutes' future with the direction of economic reforms. Towards freedom, that is. Having long fulfilled their Nehruvian role, the IIMs should move further into the private sector, free to structure and run themselves the way they see best, with market competition keeping watch on quality.

The HRD Ministry, meanwhile, could concentrate on arranging the funds for primary education that are so badly needed. Grant it, too, the occasional outburst against the presumed elitism of ol' Macaulay's ghost; though if this 19th century British educationist's legacy must bear some blame for the supposed ills of 'Westernisation', let it be mostly for the 'divide' part of that old Imperial policy that drove a wedge into Indian intellectual unity. And let free agents in the private sphere undo what remains of it. That would be a free people's project.