The infrastructure in Hyderabad and its emergence as an education hub have made Schulich School of Business (SSB) choose the city over Bangalore as a base for its first full-fledged campus in India.
The Canadian B-school, part of Toronto-based York University, has entered into a partnership with GMR group to set up the school, with the latter’s non-profit arm GMR Varalakshmi Foundation providing physical infrastructure on a 25-acre site at the international airport here.
Human Resource Development minister Kapil Sibal will lay the foundation stone for the campus on Tuesday.
According to SSB dean Deszo J Horvath, they had been looking for opportunities to set up a campus in India since 2005-06. “First, we went to Mumbai because all the major corporations are headquartered there. But the land requirement of 100 acres did not materialise. Then GMR initially suggested its own land in Bangalore, which we considered positively. When GMR also offered an opportunity in Hyderabad, we decided to go for it.”
V Raghunathan, CEO, GMR Varalakshmi, said it was because the infrastructure in Bangalore was much worse than in Hyderabad, and also the latter had emerged as a major hub for education, hosting leading research institutions in several areas.
SSB would offer two-year MBA and other executive MBA programmes. Students would be selected from the same pool as for its home campus. It would have international faculty and at least 40 per cent students from abroad. The Rs 100-crore campus is expected to be ready by January 2013, with admissions set to begin from September that year.
Schulich has had a presence in India since 1991 through exchange programmes with IIM-Ahmedabad, IIM-Bangalore, and later with Indian School of Business, among others.
On the reasons for expanding Indian presence, Horvath said India had a huge demographic advantage, with 50 per cent of its population below 35, and the educational infrastructure here was not sufficient to meet the needs.
“Also, Indian companies are asking for people of other nationalities as they expand operations abroad. So the timing is perfect for our international programme,” he said.
According to him, given the global environment and the limited home market, Canadian business schools had no option but to be proactive in recruiting international students, who constitute 70 per cent of the student body at its home campus.
For SSB, the minimum entry requirements are a GMAT score of 600 and 5-7 years of experience, while the fee for the residential programme would be $12,000 per year. It would offer 18 specialisation options in the second year, including industry-specific ones for healthcare, IT, pharma, biotech, agri-business, etc.
Raghunathan said its contribution is part of its non-profit activities. The annual budget of GMR Varalakshmi Foundation is around Rs 25 crore, of which roughly 50 per cent is spent on education.
