Dr Gautam Sinha

The long awaited decision regarding the appointment of the first director of Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Kashipur has finally been taken. Prof Gautam Sinha, who is currently the director of Lal Bahadur Shastri Institute of Management (LBSIM), New Delhi has been selected to head the Uttaranchal-based IIM which has been running since a year without a director.

The ministry of Human Resource Development (HRD) has sent the final selection order to the Board of Govermors (BoG) of the institute, a senior ministry official confirmed to PaGaLGuY on Tuesday.

The issue of selecting a director for IIM Kashipur had been pending since a year after the first appointee for the post, Prof R Srinivasan of IIM Bangalore, backed out at the last minute. The HRD ministry had then advertised the post again during the month of August 2011 and subsequently received about 70 applications which were then put up before a search-cum-selection committee headed by Dr RA Mashelkar of the National Chemical Laboratory.

The first-level selection process shortlisted 15 candidates, who were then interviewed and further pruned to three candidates. These names were then sent to the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) during December 2011 who then forwarded it to the Appointments Committee of Cabinet (ACC) for the final approval.

Being one of the newest of the 13 IIMs, the headless IIM Kashipur has been awaiting someone to be at the helm of the affairs. The director position will be a contractual post with a tenure of five years, and Prof Sinha has been reported as having expressed his willingness to take up the job if he gets the final offer. With his taking over, IIM Lucknow’s mentorship of the new IIM will come to an end.

At present, along with his LBSIM role, Prof Sinha has also been a professor at IIT Kharagpur’s Vinod Gupta School of Management. He has experience of 25 years in the steel and engineering industry and has also co-authored a book called A Guide for Researchers in Management and the Social Sciences with Dr WGK Taylor and Dr T Ghoshal in 2006.

Sinha had joined LBSIM on a two-year contract on April 1, 2011.