The Institute of Management Technology (IMT), Nagpur, has appointed Rajendra Nargundkar as Director in place of Anwar Ali who took over as Director of IMT Ghaziabad a couple of months ago.
Nargundkar, who took charge only a few days ago, has already highlighted three priority areas for the institute — placements, faculty training and global tie-ups. Moreover, the business school is contemplating an increase in fee from the current Rs 8.5 lakh to Rs 10 lakh for the incoming batch of 2010 on account of general operating expenses.
“The student fee will increase in line with the inflation trend. We would also like to improve placements by having a wide range of interactions with industries. The executive training has already improved. On the faculty front, we plan to have faculty development programmes (FDPs) and global tie-ups will include both student and faculty exchanges. In fact, we recently made a policy that all tie-ups should be made under the IMT umbrella and not be campus-specific,” says Nargundkar.
IMT Nagpur has 300 students for its two-year Post Graduate Diploma in Management and the increase in strength will depend on the demand from corporates. “We’ll increase the number of students in a phased manner over the period of two years,” he says.
On the placements front, the institute expects the final placements to be extended slightly by a month and there is cautious optimism. IMT Nagpur is following a rolling placements process instead of a placement week. Already 10 students have been placed with financial services and life insurance companies and there has been a slight improvement in salaries compared with last year.
On the faculty front, IMT plans to add 5-10 teachers to the current base of 40. Though the FDPs have not been done in an organised way before, they will focus on gaps in the faculty’s ability to do research and case studies. The first of the B-school faculty to be trained will be K J Somaiya’s in February next year.
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As far as global alliances are concerned, IMT has already signed agreements global universities that it plans to make more active through joint research, student and faculty exchange programmes. “As of now, 10-15 students on an average go for exchange programmes every year but the number can easily increase to a hundred gradually,” adds Nargundkar.
Another focus area for Nargundkar is research at IMT as part of which it will reposition its journal this year and make it more focused on case studies on strategic issues in functional areas rather than research papers.