The Arindam Chaudhuri Interview You Don’t Want to Miss

In an interview with The News Minute, Arindam Chaudhuri has denied that the Indian Institute of Planning and Management (IIPM) is shutting shop. The self proclaimed management guru also dismissed the UGC, AICTE, the media and the entire country by calling them “third class”.

Here are excerpts from a loaded interview:

Q: The IIPM website had said that operations were shutting down. Is this true?

Arindam Chaudhuri: No. We are not shutting down, but re-inventing the brand.

Look, the announcement was made on the front page of The Times of India on May 11 that we were launching IIPM 2.0. Yesterday (on Thursday) several media organisations made nonsensical statements about me and IIPM saying that we are closing down but we are re-inventing ourselves, as per our advertisement on the said date. Courses on the IIPM campus will be phased out after the current batch passes through but we will now collaborate with other colleges and provide our best faculty at a fee.

I will not teach stuff that everyone else is teaching, and I don’t want to be in this AICTE/UGC drama anymore. I would rather go to an institute and increase the quality there.The course content in most colleges is third class.

–Arindam Chaudhuri

Note: While Arindam Chaudhuri says this, the announcement on the IIPM website appears to be diametrically opposite. On July 2, the IIPM website had published this note on their website stating their campuses will be shutting down.

Q:You criticise the AICTE and the UGC but the students will get the same AICTE/UGC approved degrees. Are the degrees not the same?

Arindam Chaudhuri: No, it won’t be same. After getting a degree in collaboration with us, the student won’t be just an idiot passing out of some rubbish AICTE institute. My faculty will be teaching them.

But that doesn’t mean we are closing IIPM. This is just a new method. I did not want to run IIPM as it was, as this is a third-class country with third-class people running the education system. I do not want to talk to third class people which is why we have decided to launch IIPM 2.0.

–Arindam Chaudhuri

Q: But you have been accused of issuing fake degrees too.

Arindam Chaudhuri: People say that we gave out degrees. Where are the degrees? Which student had an IIPM degree? We never gave out degrees, only certificates.

The media is also not writing about the corruption within the AICTE, which is a collusion between them and a third-class bureaucracy. They are hand in glove with the UGC as well. I cannot help it if the media takes the version of the corrupt UGC over mine.

–Arindam Chaudhuri

Q: You are blaming the media, but how can you play the victim card when you’ve enjoyed their mollycoddling over a period of time?

Arindam Chaudhuri: Who says I’m playing victim? I’m just changing business models. What favour has the media done for me? In spite of me paying for the advertisements in newspapers, they still write negative things about me.

Q: But hasn’t the media treated you with kid gloves, considering that not much has actually been written about you?

Arindam Chaudhuri: I could die laughing. There was a time I was spending advertising worth Rs 100 crore in a year. That said, I have always been against the government and people used to call me whenever they needed someone to speak against the AICTE and the UGC.

Education should be free. Do not harass institutions just because we are a brand.
–Arindam Chaudhuri

Q: In September 2014, the Delhi High Court had prevented IIPM from using MBA, BBA, management course, management school, business school or B-school in their advertisements. Your comment?

Arindam Chaudhuri: Till September 2014, we won all cases against the AICTE/UGC. Then there was this other case of a private litigation being filed 12 years ago against us by a man named Mukesh.

While dismissing the case, the court said that they saw an advertisement in which we claimed to be giving these degrees. The judge said that IIPM should not be allowed to use BBM, MBA and the like on the degrees and added that our advertisements were misleading.

My lawyer asked me if we had laid those claims. But when we asked the judge for a copy of the advertisement, I found out that the ads were fake. The website looks like ours and they had picked up my pictures too. We registered a complaint with the cybercrime police.

The court judgement is wrong. I have advertised with all these newspapers but not one of these newspapers bothered to check these ads. In spite of me being one of their biggest advertisers not one of them called to ask for a clarification (in anger). Not one media organisation wrote that there were fake ads every day in my name.

Q: Would you say that the Arindam Chaudhuri brand is over?

Arindam Chaudhuri: That is your way of looking at it. As far as I’m concerned, the brand is not in trouble. I have just made my way from one facet of the business to another.

I am looking for new opportunities now and as the government is looking to promote soft-skills I would like to explore the area.

(Dhanya Rajendran is editor and co-founder of The News Minute)