Tata Confluence 2004 begins today

Tata Confluence-2004, Asia's biggest international B-school meet, will begin here on Thursday. Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad (IIM-A), which is holding the meet for the sixth consecutive time, claimed that this year's fest would be the bigger than the last five meets.

Over 400 representatives from 27 top B-Schools across the world, including 14 overseas institutes, will take part in the four-day meet. Bigwigs from the Indian corporates will also interact with the managers of tomorrow, while politicians have been kept away from the meet.

"During these four days, students from the best B-schools across the world would compete with one another in case contests, paper contests and management games under five different fairs covering the various functions of business - finance, marketing, information technology, strategy and operations," said Indira Parikh, dean of IIM-A.

"Industry leaders and academicians from all over the world would deliver insightful talks and participate in panel discussions. The list of big names scheduled to visit the meet include, Alan Rosling, executive director of Tata Sons; Shankar Annaswamy, managing director of IBM, India; Sripad Nadkarni, vice-president of Coca Cola; Subir Raha, chairman of ONGC; T N Srinivasan, faculty of Yale University, and Yasheng Huang, faculty member of MIT Sloan," she added.

According to Ranjith Roy, co-ordinator, Tata Confluence-2004, this year, the Summit will explore an area of interest to the entire region - Mantras for Emerging Markets.

"The onset of the WTO opens up a whole new world of opportunities and threats for emerging nations such as India. The four-day summit engages top corporates, policy-makers, academicians and the students in a comprehensive debate involving emerging markets," said Roy.

This year, students from top B-schools will also analyse cases dealing with real-life problems faced by the Gujarat government in the field of IT.

Roy said, "The use of IT in policy formulation and implementation and the success/failure of state intervention will be critiqued. The findings and results will be implemented by state government."

On the inaugural day of the meet, the panel discussion on 'Future Directions for the Indian IT Industry,' will be attended by Clayton Locke, managing director of Sapient India, Sudhakar Ram, CEO of Mastek India and Annaswamy of IBM, India.

On Friday, students will take part in competitions such as the preliminary round of McKinsey Strateosphere Simulation games, ONGC Opulence Paper Contest, GreySell ITC Simulation Game, GIK Technocrat Paper Contest.

Managing Director of Tata Services, T R Doongaji will deliver Tata Corporate Lecture in the afternoon and Ramesh Mangaleswaran will deliver the McKinsey Corporate Lecture. The evening will see a panel discussion on 'India/China as FDI Destinations'.

Saturday will see Sripad Nadkarni, vice-president of Coca-Cola delivering a lecture on 'Winning the Cola Wars'-the battle between Coke and Pepsi. Peston Brandford will deliver lecture during Sapient Corporate Lecture session. At midnight there would be 'Party at the Ramp.

On Sunday the closing address will be by Raha of ONGC. The meet will conclude with Spaient BizQuizitive hosted by Siddhartha Basu.