India's B-School grads now rake in the big rupees

According to the Economist magazine's Economic Intelligence Unit, the management school here at Ahmedabad is the toughest business school in the world to get into. The fact that more and more students with prior work experience now attend these Indian management institutes - all the students who received the highest salary offers have had a year or more of prior work experience - also makes them more desirable for international firms.

The IIMs were started by the Indian government in 1961 and remain dependent on government funding, a shortcoming according to some professors today. The institutes worked closely with with Harvard Business School to develop a similar system of case-study teaching. Most of the students are Indian, but in recent years, the Indian schools have begun to attract international students because their programs are relatively inexpensive. BusinessWeek.com's survey of MBA costs, estimates that the two-year program here costs just $7,500 for Indians and $22,000 for foreigners, compared to an MBA at Harvard which costs about $138,000.

Skills for multitasking, flexibility across management functions, cross-cultural experience, and an emphasis on translating theory into practice, sets these students apart, say faculty here.

But despite the surge in demand for Indian business school alumni, some Indians say that business schools are selling more image than top-notch pedagogy.

Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, the director of the School of Convergence in New Delhi and a visiting faculty at the Lucknow branch of IIM, says that several talented students who did not clear the stringent entrance exams to these high-profile institutes, would nevertheless make very capable managers.

"These [IIM] recruits," says Mr. Thakurta, "are representative of only a minuscule portion of Indian talent."

But in a nation where the per capita income of an average Indian is only $3,100 (compared to the world average of $8,180) and the unemployment rate here remains at 9.2 percent, most Indians say at these prices, the MBA grads are overpaid.

An SMS poll conducted by New Delhi Television, an Indian television news channel last month, asked their viewers if Indian management grads from schools like the IIMs were worth their big salaries. Seventy percent of those who voted said no.

But Mr. Dholakia says that the stature of management schools here is symbolic of more than just a brand name that draws in top recruiters.

"You cannot sell a product just by its brand image," he says. "No company will visit us repeatedly if we aren't intrinsically good." This year, out of the 110 companies that recruited at IIM, Ahmedabad, says Dholakia, 80 percent were returning firms.

Among those, Barclays Capital was the top recruiter this year, hiring 15 full-time grads - their highest ever from one management school.

"The IIMs offer access to a very smart, highly quantitative, yet business-focused pool of candidates," says Derek Walker, the company's head of graduate recruitment. "We're very pleased with the caliber of [these] students."

Barclays Capital also recruits business grads from other universities in Europe and America, and this year they've recruited three times the number of business grads compared with last year.

"Next year," Dholakia predicts, "this trend should continue. And I won't be too surprised if the pay packets get fatter."

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