From 50 Years Ago: Freedom and Control.

That public sector enterprises have also to make profit; that their management should be free from interference; that extensive powers should be delegated to them by Government in such matters as expenditure on both capital and rev-enue account within the total budget approved by the Board of Management; ...all these seem to have been accepted without reservation. The Indian model has been adopted or rather ap-proved by the representatives of the other un-der-developed countries in South East Asia. It is in the home country that the model has yet to be established and operated successfully. On this very important subject of autono-my vs control, which has often been debated. Pandit Nehru took his education in public when he moved the Bill in Lok Sabha to declare the Indian Statistical Institute to be “an institute of national importance”. The In-stitute has not only put India on the statisti-cal map of the world, it may also claim to have put statistics on the world map… There have been moves in the past to give it the status and the statutory recognition of a University but so far the ISI has fought shy of too close an association with the Government. The Bill which was passed, therefore, may be believed to have provided a workable solution for a problem which had hitherto proved intrac-table. That problem was how to reconcile the freedom of operation of a research-cum-edu-cational institution with Government control, which is inevitable, if the Government takes over financial responsibility for it... The Act will ensure financial stability to the Institute and enable it to confer degrees and diplomas on its students. But what is the price that the Institute will have to pay for these privileges?