Visva Bharati management course launch next year

Visva Bharati University (VBU) is trying hard to start its new two years full time master of business administration (MBA) course by the academic year 2005-06.

"VBU aims to come up with the MBA course in the academic session 2005-06 in a smaller scale at least.

The course will be in its full swing from the next academic year", Sujit K Basu, vice-chancellor of VBU told Business Standard on the sidelines of the convocation of Institute of Modern Management, an institute that had its MBA course under the aegis of VBU till recently.

Basu said the delay in commencing with the new course was solely due to theft of the Nobel prize medal from VBU.

Te course would be in line with that of the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) with specialisation in marketing, finance and other popular courses.

The fully residential programme would be costing similar to MBA courses at IIMs, or around Rs 1.5-2 lakh, though the final fees structure had not been finalised.

The intake was expected to be around 60 student per year.

Recently, Visva Bharati University has withdrawn its approval from around 20 private institutes for their MBA programme.

"There was some technical anomalies in the process under which the approvals were granted. This withdrawal was independent of the quality of those institutes", said Basu.

Basu was optimistic on placement of management graduates when they came out of VBU.

"The new MBA course would attract good companies for placement ", he claimed.

Last year, good students from chemistry and linguistics were selected from Visva Bharati University by employers, he added.

VBU has undertaken steps to add value to other courses as well.

"VBU has made computer training mandatory in undergraduate courses. It is now concentrating on soft skills like communication which are desired by companies at the placement stage", said the vice chancellor.

Recently, the university entered into an arrangement with the University of California for exchange programmes in areas like literature, Bengali language, culture and art, he added.