Google makes Rs 1.5-cr offers to IIT-Roorkee students

IITs see nearly three times increase in Asian companies on campus

The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Roorkee, has taken over its peers in terms of the highest pay package offered to students. Google Inc has offered an annual salary of Rs 1.54 crore each to four IIT-Roorkee students. The institute, which will place 1,600 students this year, has seen 60 companies on campus so far with one-fourth of the batch size already placed.

“Placements so far have been good and we are confident of placing 1,200 students before we close the first phase of our placements,” said a placement official from IIT-Roorkee.

Other IITs have also seen pay packages in the region of Rs 1.3 crore, which came from some US software firms.

The IITs said that this year, Asian countries, too, have recruited in good numbers. "The mix of origin countries of multinational companies (MNC) is increasingly getting diverse. Earlier, an MNC would mostly mean an American firm. But now, more and more Japanese, Korean, French, German and other European firms are coming to the campus," said a placement committee member at IIT-Kanpur.

For instance, apart from Mitsubishi (Japan) and Samsung (South Korea), IIT-Kanpur received offers from Sony (Japan), Michelin (France) and Deutsche Bank (Germany). Of these, Samsung and Mitsubishi have offered jobs in Korea and Japan, respectively, while others are yet to declare.

While Mitsubishi, which debuted last year with 10 offers at IIT-Kanpur, continued the trend with similar figures this year again, Samsung raised the bar from last year's five offers to 20 this year at the IIT-Kanpur campus. IIT-Bombay, on the other hand, has seen a three-fold jump in the number of South Asian companies visiting the campus. “Till last year, we had around five companies. This year, we have 15 companies confirming participation,” said an official from the placement office of IIT-Bombay.

Samsung has so far made the largest number of offers - 42. Other South Asian companies include Rakuten, an international shipping services company; Konica Minolta Inc, a Japanese technology firm; Sysmex Corporation, a health care business company; NEC Corporation and NTT Communication, among others. The trend is also visible at IIT-Madras, which saw recruiters such as Sumitomo Chemical (Japan), Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Sysmex Corporation and Samsung making one, seven, two and three offers, respectively.

Such has been the response from recruiters at IIT-Kanpur, which is expecting 225 firms this year, of which so far 80 have already visited. Last year, 175 companies had visited the institute. On completion of the Day Three of placement at IIT-Madras, 267 offers were issued - 96 on the first day, 103 on the second and 68 on the third day. The number of students registered for placement stood at 1,366. At the institute, the highest international salary offered was $210,000 a year and domestic offer was Rs 48.6 lakh a year. Last year, the highest international offer was at $150,000 a  year and the the domestic offer was Rs 28.82 lakh a year. While Cisco Systems India Pvt Ltd offered jobs to 14 candidates, Oracle India Pvt Ltd offered 13 jobs and Tata Motors offered nine jobs.