Apart from the Central government’s generously funded and heavily subsidised IIMs, which offer high-quality business management education to a mere 1.4 percent of the 232,000 students who write CAT annually, there are a few dozen private B-schools which offer quality education to MBA aspirants looking for other options – Summiya Yasmeen writes about India’s top 50 private B-schools 2017 Even though a handful of India’s top-ranked business management institutes such as the Central government-promoted Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) sited in Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Calcutta, and latterly the privately promoted Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, are globally renowned and ranked among the global Top 100 by the highly respected Financial Times, London, the majority of the country’s 3,450 B-schools are annually certifying an estimated 332,000 MBAs who are totally unprepared for employment in India Inc. According to a 2016 survey conducted by Assocham (Associated Chambers of Commerce of India), only 7 percent of MBAs certified by Indian B-schools are employable in Indian and foreign multinationals. The survey reveals that over the past five years, the number of seats in B-schools countrywide doubled from 360,000 in 2011-12 to 520,000 in 2015-16. Predicting an “unfolding B-school disaster”, the Assocham survey highlights “lack of quality control and infrastructure, low-paying jobs through campus placement and poor faculty” as the causes of under-qualified MBAs entering Indian industry. Unfortunately, few people are aware of the high socio-economic price paid by society and the citizenry for poor quality business management education dispensed to all graduates except the brightest and best 1.4 percent who top the annual CAT (common admission test) of the country’s 20 IIMs and/or the ISB entrance exam. Employee productivity in Indian industry, agriculture, government and the services sector is among the lowest worldwide, and ICOR (incremental capital output ratio), i.e, units of capital required to produce a unit of output, is among the highest (4:1) worldwide. The consensus of informed opinion is that the blame for the mushroom growth of B-schools of indifferent quality should be laid at the door of the Delhi-based All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE, estb. 1987), the apex licensing and supervisory body for engineering, business management, pharmacy, architecture, and hotel management education. For the past 30 years, AICTE chairmen and bureaucrats have indiscriminately licensed private sector B-schools without proper study of the antecedents and education delivery capabilities of their promoters. The outcome is that most B-schools are under-invested in terms of infrastructure, number and qualifications of faculty. They dispense obsolete, industry-agnostic education through faculty of dubious qualifications after seducing students through attractive advertisements, featuring tall and usually unverifiable claims of six-figure campus placements. However, while this general indictment of the great majority of the country’s B-schools is justifiable, there are exceptions to the rule. Apart from the generously-funded and heavily-subsidised IIMs which routinely top all media rankings surveys and offer high-quality management education to a mere 3,300 of the 232,000 students who top CAT, there are a few dozen privately promoted B-schools which offer acceptable quality postgraduate business…
