EWIHER 2024-25: India’s Top 100 Private B-Schools

India’s private B-schools capable of responding quickly to changes in the business environment and customising their curriculums accordingly, are likely to play an increasingly important role to modernise and upgrade India Inc to compete with the world’s most dominant corporations, writes Dilip Thakore If India’s estimated 5,000 business management institutes, aka B-schools — some of them of over half century vintage — were half as good as they claim to be, the Indian economy would be booming and 21st century India would not be in the bottom rung of economic development league tables including the World Bank’s per capita income, UNDP’s Human Development and the World Economic Forum’s industrial progress indices. Although politicians of all shades and hues proclaim it a developed country, the plain truth is that 77 years after attaining independence from foreign rule, India is routinely ranked among the world’s poorest and backward nations defined by acute shortages of food, clothing, shelter, affordable healthcare and education. Obviously, the nasty, brutish and perhaps too long lives that the overwhelming majority of Indian citizens are obliged to endure, can’t be the fault of the country’s B-schools. However some blame for none of India’s companies being listed among the largest, most respected, competitive and innovative, must surely be laid at their door. Some, but not all because the prime cause of the backwardness of India Inc is socialist ideology foolishly imposed upon newly independent India by the Congress party which remained in government at the Centre and most states of the country for over half a century. Under the “socialist pattern of society”, India’s 256 Central government PSEs and an equal number promoted by state governments failed to generate the surpluses for investment in infrastructure, public health and education. Simultaneously bound up in red tape India’s high-potential private sector companies failed to grow and prosper and were surpassed by Japanese, Korean and latterly Chinese private corporations. Against this backdrop, India’s first B-school, the Indian Institute of Management-Calcutta (IIM-C) was established in 1961 with American funding and grudgingly permitted collaboration with the MIT’s Sloan School of Management (USA). IIM-C was soon followed by IIM-Ahmedabad and IIM-Bangalore. Yet the contribution of these three premier IIMs to the national development effort remained hazy until the advent of the country’s first business magazines — Business India and BusinessWorld — made private enterprise respectable and shone a spotlight on these capital-intensive B-schools which certified 200-300 MBAs annually. Suddenly the two-year wholly residential MBA programmes of the IIMs became very popular and 50,000-100,000 candidates started writing CAT (Common Admission Test) of the IIMs whose number has since multiplied to 21 countrywide. Moreover with the increasing liberalisation of the shackled Indian economy which averaged a pitiful GDP growth of 3.5 percent per annum for over 40 years, several other B-schools mushroomed all over the country providing good, bad and indifferent business management education to an ever increasing number of students. In 2013, we introduced the EducationWorld India Higher Education Rankings (EWIHER). The annual EWIHER inter alia also…