Ranade was appointed as vice-chancellor of GIPE in February 2022. A well-known economist, he completed a post graduate diploma in Management from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and PhD in Economics from Brown University, US.

A former GIPE faculty member Murali Krishna had filed a complaint with the University Grants Commission (UGC) that there was a violation of regulations in the appointment of Ranade as V-C. The point in contention is that a candidate must have at least 10 years’ experience as a professor for the position. UGC has acted on the complaint. On January 15, a letter from UGC was addressed to the then GIPE chancellor Rajiv Kumar – the present chancellor is Bibek Debroy – calling for a convincing reply with suitable documents.

On January 26, the UGC wrote again that GIPE had failed to give a convincing reply. Questions about conflict of interest have been asked by the Servants of India Society (SIS), under which GIPE falls, and there have been reports of a section of the faculty protesting as well.

“UGC wrote to our then chancellor Rajiv Kumar, on June 4 and again on June 26 stating that the institute has not given the correct reply to a January letter and a Memorandum of Understanding, regarding the new UGC policy, has not been provided. These two are the main contentious issues that the UGC wrote, but that letter was never addressed to us and we didn’t receive it. It was written to the chancellor. The institute didn’t know that UGC was having a problem as they didn’t ever ask us,” said Ranade.

He added that the Memorandum of Understanding, which details how the Institute will perform within the given rules and regulations, was sent in June. “UGC said that they had not received it but that is factually incorrect because we sent it on June 14. We have a receipt that it received it on June 18. On June 26, they wrote that it has not been received,” he added. “We wrote to them and said that we had already sent it and there is proof. We are awaiting their reply.”

“As a matter of routine, if something is written to the chancellor, he is expected to write to the vice-chancellor and ask about the issues. That’s exactly what has happened. Two weeks were given by the chancellor and our vice-chancellor has requested him for some more time, around a month, because a lot of data has to be compiled. Some more time has been given and, the day we are ready, with the reply, we will send it to our chancellor,” he said.

About the chief point of contention — the 10-year experience as a professor — Ranade said that when one has to be appointed as vice chancellor, then one is required to have certain qualifications, such as one has to have a good academic background. “You need to have served in a university for 10 years as a professor or carried out an equivalent research in a research or an administrative organization. There is an ‘or’. Nobody can do that, since if you do not have 10 years of experience in a university as a professor, then you become ineligible automatically,” he said.

“The entire selection process is done by a very high-powered committee. We can’t doubt their integrity. They would have done a thorough check and only after that they would have recommended the panel to the vice chancellor and, out of that, the vice chancellor selected one. We really are not in the position to comment on what deliberations that committee did but we are also not in a position to suspect that what they did was wrong or right,” said Ranade.