Bangalore-headquartered infrastructure company, GMR group, wants to make a mark in business education too, and its collaboration with Toronto-based Schulich School of Business (SSB) for a campus in Hyderabad is a step in that direction, according to its chairman G Mallikarjuna Rao.
Speaking at the ground-breaking ceremony for the b-school at the GMR aeretropolis here today, Rao said that for the next 10 years, India would continue to send a large number of its students to Western universities for higher education.
It was this factor that made the group look for partner institutions in the United States and Europe for three years since 2006, when, on the suggestion of Canadian embassy officials, it came across Schulich and found it suitable.
According to SSB dean Deszo Horvath, the new campus would be a mirror image of the Toronto campus, and would focus on creating “a new breed of globally-oriented managers for the growing number of Indian trans-national companies.”
The Hyderabad campus would begin functioning from September 2013, with an initial intake of 60 students and going up to 120 and 180 in the second and third years respectively.
Chief minister Kiran Kumar Reddy said the government would encourage quality higher education institutions to set up campuses in the city. It was also focusing on improving education in government schools and making higher education accessible to all. It was spending Rs 3,500 crore on fee reimbursement and scholarships, covering 2.7 million students in the state, he said.
In a message, Union human resource development minister Kapil Sibal said the government proposed to restructure the regulatory mechanisms to give more autonomy to institutions.
In keeping with practices worldwide, it would also create an independent and credible accreditation system for quality assessment of educational institutions, and also a tribunal for adjudication of disputes, he said.
