Given good leadership India’s best private B-schools, promoted, constructed and commissioned at great expense, have the potential to re-imagine and conceptualise innovative, organic syllabuses and curriculums to stimulate a massive productivity leap in India Inc and other sectors of the economy, says Dilip Thakore The best of India’s estimated 6,000 business management schools, aka B-schools, represent a curious social paradox. On the one hand they are widely respected not only in India but around the world. Apart from invariably topping all media surveys domestically, the premier Central government promoted Indian Institutes of Management IIMs) sited in Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Kolkata, Bangalore, Lucknow and Indore are routinely ranked among the world’s Top 200 by respected international rating agencies including the London-based QS. Moreover the privately promoted Indian School of Business, Hyderabad is regularly ranked among the Top 20 worldwide by the Financial Times. Yet Indian industry has little to show for the thousands of alumni of these top-ranked postgrad B-schools who have streamed into India Inc since 1961 when IIM-Calcutta and IIM-Ahmedabad were promoted. The record of Indian industry and the economy measured by workplace productivity, innovative research and revolutionary products and services, compares very poorly with American, Western and Asian countries, especially neigbouring China. Various explanations are offered for this paradox. Among them: the syllabuses and curriculums of B-schools tend to focus on US-style free markets, while the Indian economy is government dominated and highly regulated; socialist era licence-permit-quota government regulations prevent graduates from applying education and knowledge acquired in B-schools; managing ubiquitous corruption in government and industry regulatory agencies is not factored into B-school curriculums. Neither are ways and means to manage legacy corporates and conglomerates in which inexperienced sons and daughters succeed first generation entrepreneurs and promoters. The relatively poor competitive record of India Inc when compared with Fortune 500 companies suggests that the education dispensed by India’s best B-schools is not quite in sync with the needs and requirements of industry and the economy. Nevertheless there’s no reason to believe that the country’s best B-schools are not sentient learning organisations with vast scope for improvement. Given good leadership, India’s top-ranked private B-schools, promoted, constructed and commissioned at great expense, have the potential to re-imagine and conceptualise innovative, organic syllabuses and curriculums to stimulate a massive productivity leap in India Inc and other sectors of the economy. Moreover with their excellent, globally benchmarked campuses with state-of-the-art infrastructure, digital connectivity and international outreach and students selectivity, they provide their privileged students opportunities to make great breakthroughs in innovative, original research. That’s why India’s best B-schools are national assets that deserve detailed scrutiny and SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analyses that the annual EW B-schools rankings provide institutional managements and postgrad students searching for business management education best suited to their aptitudes and aspirations. However given the abundant information available in mainstream media about government promoted IIMs which routinely top national rankings surveys and admit a mere 2.5 percent percent of college graduates who write their annual joint Common Admission Test,…
