India’s most respected non-IIM B-schools

Between them the Central government-owned IIMs admit only 2,880 of the 214,000 graduates who write the CAT (Common Admission Test) annually. EducationWorld commissioned the Delhi-based C fore to assess and rank India’s most respected non-IIM B-schools. Dilip Thakore reports Conterminously with the onset of the south-west monsoon and the commencement of the new academic year, 214,000 graduates of India’s 33,000 colleges and 659 universities as also a growing number of early and mid-career business executives who wrote the rigorous CAT (Common Admission Test, the joint entrance exam of the country’s 13 Indian Institutes of Management), AIMAT (All India Management Association Test) and specific admission exams administered by several business management education institutes this summer, are readying to enter one or the other of the country’s estimated 4,500 B-schools which have mushroomed countrywide. Having invested Rs.2-20 lakh per year by way of tuition fees, they carry high hopes and dreams in their minds and hearts as they enter the campuses of good, bad and ugly institutes of business education. Given the chance, the overwhelming majority of graduates who clear CAT and other B-school entrance exams would opt to join one of the country’s Central government-owned Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), pref-erably one of the vintage ABC (Ahmed-abad, Bangalore, Calcutta) IIMs which over the past half century since they were established, have acquired global reputations for business management education. However, between them, the 13 IIMs admit only 2,880 students who top CAT annually, and of them six institutes are of very recent vintage and scarcely boast premises, let alone the sprawling green campuses of the premier seven IIMs. The remaining 210,000-plus students are obliged to either go abroad (a relatively very expensive proposition) or pick and choose from among the other 4,500 B-schools countrywide — a risky proposition given that behind their glitzy facades and often paid-for media hype, a great majority of them are severely deficient in terms of competent faculty and contemporary curriculums, pedagogies and processes. “The huge reputation the IIMs enjoy is more because they attract the country’s best graduates, rather than the quality of faculty which is quite mediocre. I believe that the top 25 percent graduates of the best non-government B-schools are as good as the bottom 25 performers — in terms of grade points average — of the IIMs. They offer better value to companies inasmuch as they have more modest remuneration expectations and are more flexible about posting and assignments. Moreover there is a discernible growth of institutional pride in the best non-IIM B-schools which is in the national interest, because it spurs them to compete hard to close the quality gap between them and the IIMs,” says Manab Bose a former director of Colgate-Palmolive, GE and Tata Industries who supervised the HRD portfolio in these blue-chip corporates. Currently Bose, an alum of the Tavistock Clinic, UK, is the founder-director of the Bangalore-based Sukrut Human and Organisation Consultants Pvt. Ltd, which runs a busy psychotherapy clinic in this garbage — sorry, garden — city. Caution…