 "Ajit Rangnekar")
The Indian School of Business (ISB) is one of the two B-schools in India to have the AACSB (Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business) accreditation, considered the highest international accreditation for a management school. However, the B-schools yearns for recognition from its own regulatory authorities back home. Ajit Rangnekar, dean of ISB, tells Kalpana Pathak the institute is genuine and wants the government to take it seriously. Excerpts:
The All India Council for Technical Education's (AICTE) existence is in question. What happens to your case with AICTE now?
Honestly, I am aggressively looking at how I can get recognised by our own regulatory authorities. But now, with the AICTE's existence itself in doubt, we are exploring what options we have in terms of getting recognised. I will be more than happy to be recognised as a whole lot of unscrupulous institutions are hiding behind us saying ISB is not recognised. We are keen to be recognised but there is no one-year MBA provision. I hope the government recognises our plight, knows that we are genuine and takes us seriously.
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Have you explored the university way of getting recognised?
We are not very comfortable with the idea of approaching a university as that may require splitting the two campuses - Hyderabad and Mohali. I am hoping that the government comes out with new regulations which are more sensible than the AICTE regulations.
Other than recognition, what are the challenges ISB sees for itself?
Singapore is still a big challenge. There is almost 50 per cent increase over US faculty salaries. Now where do I fight that? We recently lost a professor to an institute from Singapore. But ISB can't do much about this. We have not lost every time, but we have lost a few times. Compared to them, we have better access to a wider variety of issues to strengthen our research. That is what we have to keep pushing. Three positive things that work for Singapore are: money, infrastructure and good schools for children. On the other hand, we can offer spouses a career and a better research environment.
What is your faculty recruitment strategy?
We plan to take our faculty pool from the current 50 to about 85 in the next few years. And we will aggressively look at recruiting senior faculty members. Hitherto, our focus was more on recruiting fresh faculty and grooming them. But now we are serious about taking senior faculty on board along with middle-level faculty members and fresh faculty, too. We expect to have around 20 senior faculty members from that mix. Currently, we have seven senior faculty members.
Given the shortage of faculty members, how seriously is ISB taking its PhD programmes?
We had launched our fellow programme in management in 2011. We have got nine students so far against the strength of 15 for the class. We hope to get more this year. On quality, I am extremely happy; but on volume, I am not. I think the real success would be if we are able to place these students internationally. We did not expand the class size as we did not want to go for numbers but quality.
How is your tie-up with Asian universities doing? Have you been able to attract foreign students?
It is a pure marketing tie-up to help us propagate each other's name. But the reality for us is that India is not a destination for students. One, we can't give an MBA and, two, our admission criterion is extremely stringent. So the bigger issue is that India, which was seen as a promising destination for management education, is no longer so. However, at this moment, we are neither cancelling our tie-up nor putting in more effort.
Do you plan to increase your batch size going forward?
No. We do not intend to increase the class sizes. We don't have the capacity to do so and there are logistical issues involved. We will always keep coming up with newer programmes. I think we have shifted gears to focus on specialised programmes. We want to build demonstrated expertise in the market in a few areas such as manufacturing, supply chain, logistics, optimisation, healthcare, public policy and governance. That will be our focus. We will expand our capacity in executive education programmes and non-post graduate programmes, which are more likely to be part-time rather than full-time.
