By Bizodisha Bureau, Bhubaneswar, September 7, 2015 : Even as the Odisha government began land transfer process for the Indian Institute of Management Sambalpur [IIMS]’s permanent campus by identifying 124.70 acres land at Basantpur, near the western Odisha town of Sambalpur, the new B-school is struggling to get students as well as teachers.

The IIMS has so far received 12 students seeking admission. Worse still is the fact five students have sought withdrawal from the IIMS. That leaves only 7 students out of 60 seats available with the new B-school. The classes of the maiden batch of students were to start from September 1 commence from it temporary campus at Silicon Institute near Sason, near Sambalpur for which its mentor institute IIM Indore has made all arrangement. But now it has been postponed to September 23 due to lack of students.

Even teachers from IIM I, Indore have expressed their inability to visit the IIMS campus citing distance, inaccessibility, communication and personal problem.

Now both the centre and the state governments are in dilemma about starting the maiden session of the IIMS. In order to resolve the impending crisis, a high level meeting of officials from both the stat and central government and representatives from IIM, Indore have been called on September 10 here to sort out the problems faced by the IIMS, officials said here.

“These are the teething problems a newly launched Institute always faces. If the government decides to bring in more students, it could bring down the cut off marks of students. Besides, the government can play a pro-active role either in getting teachers from IIM, Indore or any other eminent teachers from other institutes to run IIMS”, says Prof Haribandhu Panda, pro-Chancellor of Centurion University, here.

Dr Sudhakar Panda, economist and former chairman of third state finance commission, however, made it clear that setting up IIM at Sambalpur was a wrong move. “The students must have a choice of place where they study. Having IIM at Sambalpur has come as disincentive for both the students and teachers due to logistic problems. Now the option before the government is to appoint a director at IIMS and give him full power to run it”.