The Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A), has decided to draw candidates from its alumni to address the faculty crunch the institute has faced for some time.
Lack of qualified candidates has been a cause for concern for the premier institute and it still falls short of the magic figure of 110 members — despite hiring 28 new members in the last two years or so — to reach a reasonably comfortable student-teacher ratio. The other reason for the shortfall is that its staff has been periodically reaching retirement age.
“Our faculty strength sometime back was 94 while we need it to be at least 110. With 1,000-odd students, the faculty-student ratio stands at 1:11,” Samir Barua, director of IIM-A told reporters here today.
The institute is considering ways to fill the vacancies and hopes to achieve its target in the near future. “We have been successful in addressing this issue by recruiting our doctoral programme alumni, some of whom are willing to return to the campus after gaining industry experience,” said Barua.
The IIM-A is also working towards consolidating its depleting corpus. According to Barua, the financial year 2009-10 saw IIM-A’s operating losses at Rs 5-7 crore, leaving the institute’s coffer with Rs 43 crore from Rs 51 crore.
“Payment of the Sixth Pay Commission arrears was one of the reasons for our depleting corpus. This includes not only the faculty and staff but also about 300 pensioners, the largest across all IIMs,” he said. Moreover, the institute recently concluded expansion of residential blocks within the campus by adding 300 apartments at Rs 30 crore.
“The institute is open to raising funds by inviting sponsorships against naming of facilities on campus. For instance, we named a facility after one of our alumni, late Sunil Mehta, at our Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE).”
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IIM-A will celebrate its 50th anniversary on December 11 and plans to hold a series of workshops and conferences showcasing its research contribution, apart from reaching out to its alumni and setting an agenda for the next 10 years.
“We are hosting an all-batch alumni meet as well in December 2010 as part of the anniversary celebrations. The event will see participation from not only around 8,000 alumnni from our degree programmes, but also from our other programmes,” Barua added.
The premier B-school is set to launch 11 new management development programmes in 2010-11, including Human Resource Management from its virtual campus in Dubai, a programme in Professional Management of Sports Organisations and People’s Issues in Business Process Outsourcing. The institute plans to offer 67 programmes this academic year.
Talking about IIM-A’s mentee IIM-Udaipur, Barua said, “Recently, the government allotted land for the campus. While C K Birla of Hindustan Motors has been appointed as the chairman of the board for IIM-Udaipur, a governing board is yet to be constituted and a director needs to be appointed. Once that happens, things are expected to move further. As for the campus, it is not expected to come up before 2011.”
Meanwhile, with the 27 per cent OBC quota implementation, IIM-A has admitted 380 students for its flagship PGP and 40 for its PGP-ABM programmes.