The Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A), completes 50-years of its existence and is also ranked eighth on the latest Financial Times (FT) B-school rankings for the Masters in Management programme 2010. Samir Barua, Director IIM-A, shares with Kalpana Pathak his plans for the institute in its 50th year. Edited excerpts:
IIM-A completes 50 years of its existence. What are IIM-A’s plans?
IIM-A will enter its 50th year on December 11, 2010. A year-long celebration of the Golden Jubilee will begin on that day by honouring retired faculty members, board members and staff who have served at IIM-A. We will also be bringing out many publications on the institute and on management. We will be holding international conferences too.
Is the Hyderabad campus also on IIM-A’s 50th year agenda?
We will actually begin work on the campus now and may complete it by mid next year. We have framed a proposal which has been sent to the government of Andhra Pradesh. The campus will be around 150-200 acres. Finance for the campus will largely be arranged by us. The government, however, will help us by urging local industrialists to donate. We would like to initially begin with executive education programmes and then take it forward.
This is for the first time IIM-A has been ranked for its flagship programme. Why did you not participate earlier?
There is always a first for anything. This is the first time we participated. I can’t answer why we did not participate earlier. We have also participated in rankings for the executive programme and we expect the result later this year.
What benefits do you see from the ranking?
The benefit is in terms of reputation. It will help us attract a good number of quality applications for faculty positions. We may also benefit in terms of proposals from international B-schools for academic collaborations.
I, however, do not see immediate advantage in terms of international students on our campus. International students who apply to B-schools score over 700 in GMAT examination. Thus, they may prefer going to another school.