Despite being relative late starters and obliged to compete on an unequal playing field, private B-schools have been able to carve out their spaces in the public imagination. C fore representatives interviewed 1,216 B-school faculty and industry representatives to rate and rank India’s India’s top 100 private B-Schools 2019-20 – Dilip Thakore Over half a century ago the Indian Institute of Management-Calcutta (IIM-C) was established in 1961 by the government of India in collaboration with the Sloane School of Management of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ford Foundation and government of West Bengal, and was soon followed by IIM-Ahmedabad (1961) and IIM-Bangalore (1973). Since then India’s 2,842 private B-schools, which heavily outnumber the country’s 20 IIMs and 168 other government business management institutes, have had their genius clouded by government B-schools, especially the top half dozen vintage IIMs. This situation wouldn’t surprise any serious student of post-independence India’s socio-economic history. The government-sponsored IIMs were given huge 100 acre-plus tracts of land gratis and massive grants to set up shop. Moreover, the tuition fees of graduate students who topped CAT (Common Admission Test), the joint entrance exam of the IIMs, were heavily subsidised and until recently were less than 5 percent of the actual cost of education provision. Besides, these wholly residential government-sponsored B-schools attracted the best faculty from across the country and often from abroad. On the other hand, privately promoted B-schools, which naturally mushroomed to provide business management education to the hundreds of thousands who weren’t accepted by the IIMs, were reluctantly licensed and almost universally condemned (in the absence of subsidies from the public exchequer) for charging extortionate fees and indulging in — horror of horrors — “commercialisation of education”. To their great credit, despite being relative late starters and obliged to compete on an unequal playing field, several privately promoted B-schools have been able to carve out their spaces in the public imagination, and have established excellent reputation for providing high-quality business management education. Given the bafflingly modest annual students intake of the IIMs promoted with heavy investment from the public purse, the great majority of the 250,000-plus graduates who write CAT annually have no option but to settle for admission into indigenous private B-schools, given that the tuition fees demanded by business management schools abroad are invariably many multiples higher. Commendably, India’s 2,917 private institutes of management education have proved equal to the task of supplying well-trained and prepared managers for India Inc, particularly medium and small-scale companies which cannot afford the high starting salaries that IIM grads expect and get. Proof of the education provision capabilities of India’s private B-schools is inherent in the fast growth and development of India’s SMEs (small and medium enterprises) in the post-liberalisation era. Against this backdrop and given the paucity of information about private B-schools in the media which, unmindful of the unequal playing field skewed in favour of the IIMs, sing their praises, five years ago, your editors resolved to beam a searchlight on the country’s media-neglected private…
