He had a job to do...to get jobs for some of the best brains in the country amid the global recession. Samir Barua, director of Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A) has gone against the tide and got placed almost all the students of post graduate programme in management (PGP) and agri business management (PGP-ABM) at the recently concluded placements. Barua, who admits that this has been the worst year for IIM-A placement since the dotcom bust in 2001, shares his experience with Maulik Pathak and Vinay Umarji of how the institute managed to cope up with the trying times and his plans for the next academic year. Edited excerpts:
You must be a relaxed man after the placements.
(Laughs) Absolutely. Although we had apprehensions about the recession spoiling the placements, we were prepared for it and it has turned out all right.
What steps did you take to ensure smooth placements?
You are aware that most of our placements happen in the finance sector which is the hardest hit and it was a big concern. The biggest challenge (for us) was to bring companies (from sectors other than finance) who used to come earlier and had later stopped visiting the campus and we really had to convince them hard. We had used the argument that this year as well as the next, finance may not be visiting the campus or will not play a major role. The placement this year has been the worst since the dotcom bust in 2001.
This has, however, opened up opportunities for PSU companies like BPCL, IOC and GAIL.
Will it not be a challenge to work in a PSU?
PSUs are open to contractual appointments like three years, five years or more, on negotiated compensation with an option of being absorbed later. The students will not be doing regular jobs. These PSUs will now carve out specific initiatives like strategy development for our students. If this experiment succeeds, it could open new doors. Whether it is permanent or not depends on how challenging these jobs become for students.
So has the value system changed? Is it due to the slowdown that students are willing to experiment?
Earlier there was a fascination for foreign postings/jobs. It’s a question of the risk-reward ratio which has undergone a change. Unlike earlier, it [the risk-reward ratio] has shifted towards domestic companies like PSUs. This trend is likely to continue for the next two years or so.
In the last many years, IIM-A has produced many entreprenuers. How actively have they hired?
I cannot give any figures offhand but there hasn’t been significant hiring by IIM-A passout entreprenuers. Maybe the compensation provided by them is not adequate. However, there are many IIM-A passouts who have been recruiting on behalf of the companies they work for.
More From This Section
What are your focus areas for the next year?
The major focus will be on infrastructure expansion. This year we will be implementing a 7 per cent OBC quota expansion to take it to 13 per cent and by next year we will fully implement the 27 per cent quota. Under knowledge creation, we have taken the first few steps by putting case studies on the web. In a more significant way, we are editing the case studies, making them more uniform and then putting them on the web — we hope to have a substantial number of case studies (around 400) by May-June this year.
Do you expect doctoral programmes to supply faculty for the institute?
About 50 per cent of them will go to industry. Part of the reason is the compensation offered there. After the Sixth Pay Commission recommendations, excluding the free housing and other perquisites, the salary will be Rs 6-7 lakh per annum at IIM-A while that of the industry is at least three times higher than this.
Any plans for expanding the doctoral programme?
We have not been able to take more than 80 students under the programme. Moreover, the stipend that we offer stands at Rs 22,000 per month while typically our annual spent on them is around Rs 6 lakh. Due to this, we are not thinking of raising the intake as of now.
Finances have been a constraint for the institute...
Yes. We had asked the government for a fund of Rs 54 crore but the government has given us only Rs 34 crore; and that too on paper except for a fund of Rs 2 crore. We have been suffering from fund insuffiency. We had a corpus of around Rs 170 crore in 2001 which has now reduced to around Rs 50 crore. It is tough to say when we will break even. Under the Sixth Pay Commission, we now have an additional burden of Rs 7-8 crore per annum since we have to pay retirement benefits and arrears from 2006. We are currently running at a deficit of, again, Rs 7-8 crore.
Moreover, request for training programmes and consulting have gone down from other institutes which used to be a source of income for us. In a way, we can say, it is a decline in constant revenues and increase of costs. The next two years are going to be tough for us.
Your take on Bhargava Committee’s recommendations?
I have said this earlier, we have put our comments before the committee to consider before implementation — the pan-IIM board is not desirable as it would undermine the current boards, and you cannot propose uniform policies across IIMs since given the pedagogy, we are quite different from each other.
Any plans to attract more international faculty?
It will be tough for us to do that as the minimum compensation that is offered internationally is around $100,000, while we pay a maximum of $25,000.
What steps are you taking to plug the faculty crunch? Also, any plans to increase the non-teaching staff?
We have added around 10 faculty members in the last 15 months and we have a current strength of 91. By 2011, when the 27 per cent quota will be fully implemented, we intend to have around 110 faculty members for 1,100 students for all the five programmes to maintain a faculty-student ratio of 1:10. On the non-teaching staff front, historically it has been large at our institute. Currently, we have around 320 and do not plan to increase it.