ISB to attract government staff

Plans scholarships but with a catch

A chef, a doctor, a model-cum-actor and a naval architect. Well, diverse their profiles may be but all of them are now batchmates at the Indian School of Business (ISB) in Hyderabad this year.

The ISB, however, misses having sufficient students from one sector "� the government. The premier school, therefore, has started giving serious thought to fill this lacuna. And what's the carrot that it plans to use as bait? "Scholarships," says M Rammohan Rao, dean of the ISB.

"We have been receiving many requests from government employees stating that they are inclined towards taking up our MBA programme. The inclination, however, does not transform into action because they are unsure about whether they will be able to recover the amount spent as fees (Rs 13 lakh as academic fees)," Rao says, adding that, therefore, financial aid seems to be the possible solution for filling in the missing link.

These scholarships will, however, be of a different kind. The fees will not be waived. Instead, the loans that will be taken by these government employees will be repaid by the ISB.

Sounds great? Hold on, there's a catch. The condition that will come into play will be that these government employees will have to go back to the organisation where they were working before instead of joining the corporate world. Ask Rao the reason and pat comes the reply, "We want the impact of their learning to be felt on the government sector." And for others who wish to join specifically for career shifts, they could do so at their own expense. Otherwise, they could as well try to qualify for the other scholarship programmes that the ISB offers.

Rao says that the idea is still in the thought process and it could take some time for implementation. However, since the ball has started rolling, don't be surprised to come across an ISB alumnus collecting your telephone bills or facing the battlefront a few years down the line. Talk of management being all-pervasive.