Dr Pritam Singh: An Exemplary Management Educationist

Dr Pawan Kumar Singh Jun 03, 2020

Padmashree Dr Pritam Singh has been a well-known personality in the field of management education in India. After serving Administrative Staff College of India at Hyderabad, and Indian Institute of Management Bangalore he joined Management Development Institute at Gurgaon. He stayed with MDI Gurgaon as Director in two different innings. During his role in his first part at MDI Gurgaon, he consolidated and enhanced the quality of the two-year post-graduate programme in management, apart from National Management Programme that had already brought laurel to MDI Gurgaon. Due to his visionary leadership and team efforts, MDI Gurgaon joined the league of top integrated management institute by the end of 1990s. On the financial dimension when the institute was passing through the stage of fund starvation, he saw that apart from academic excellence, it was converted to a resourceful institution in terms of the fund also. In his first inning at MDI Gurgaon, after leading the institute for about three years, he joined Indian Institute of Management Lucknow as Director. Academic fraternity in management education in India witnessed an exponential growth of IIM Lucknow in terms of length and depth due to exemplary leadership of Dr Pritam Singh. After his term at IIM Lucknow was over, he took up the leadership of MDI Gurgaon again for the second time. In the meantime, he was conferred Padmashree in 2003. It was a matter of pride for academic fraternity in general and for management faculty in particular. During his second inning in MDI Gurgaon, along with teaching, he added strength to MDI Gurgaon through research, training, public policy projects and interventions. The institution started exploring newer heights of achievements.

Dr Pritam Singh was a personality of profound knowledge and a deeper understanding of any subject that he dealt with. He was known for his insightfulness. His pieces of writing including various articles and books are excellent. As a speaker, he was par excellence. In any conference, the audience used to wait for his turn as a speaker. Usually, he used to take the subject under discussion to a different level and his this quality used to force the listener to ponder over the subject from various angles. His speeches reflected that he was living example of three stages of learning – shrawan (grasping), manan (pondering over), and nididhyaasan (establishing wisdom within). He had a very special and rare quality of transcending from a quantitative base to qualitative and interpretive level of discussion.

Training requires different levels of skills. Good trainers are many but excellent ones are few and far between. Dr Pritam Singh was a power-packed trainer. He was a trainers’ trainer, he was CEO’s trainer and he was a trainer who could lead one's mind and heart in the right direction. Both, his leadership style and training style cannot be captured by a single respective model. That is the beauty of personality, when one transcends any particular framework, forcing you to search for new parameters of theorization.

Dr Singh is well known as an institution builder. He provided formal leadership to various academic institutions and especially remembered for giving new heights to MDI Gurgaon and IIM Lucknow. His leadership was multidimensional. Indian academia particularly of management faculty used to keenly watch the movements and leadership pattern of Dr Singh. He became a shining personality among management education fraternity when with his leadership MDI Gurgaon became the first institution in India to win AMBA accreditation.

Dr Singh remained busy until his last days for the sake of betterment of the education system. He chaired various high-powered committees working for enhancing academic excellence in academia. He showed the path to many academic leaders for creating great organisations.

As a person, he was very special. He was a blending of sophistication and simplicity, a combination of tough resolve and kind-heartedness. He knew that ethics is non-substitutable and perhaps knew that addressing a practical problem is like solving a jigsaw puzzle. Once he said that, at IIM Lucknow he got created a chariot carrying Lord Krishna as charioteer and Arjun as a person with bow and arrows to remind viewers that as a person we need both – consciousness and skills, to win the corporate battles. His words would keep vibrating in many hearts and would keep echoing in many ears for a very long time.