Several sledgehammers break into heavy walls, causing a cloud of rich dust to rise. "We are opening up this area to bring in some light and, of course, aesthetics!" says B.S. Sahay, director of IMT Ghaziabad. Sahay, a few weeks into his maiden directorship, is a man clearly in a hurry. The two-decade-old imt campus is abuzz with activity. All day long, lines of trucks ferry cement and concrete as contractors work to make available a 25-acre campus for the Indian Institute of Modern Management (IIMM) at Pune by November this year.

"We are building a world class campus here," says Balasubramaniam. The smell of fresh paint hangs thick in the air even as confused sounds of carpentry, metalwork and glasswork are mixed with excited voices of workmen at the remote Rourkela Institute of Management Sciences (rims) in the mining district of Orissa. "rims has plans for expansion," says Sourya Pattnaik, director of the institute. "We want our Web site to be revamped to help us market the new image of Indian School of Mines Management," a crisp mail to a Delhi Web site developer from Dhanbad announces.

Small or big, regional or metropolitan, private or government-run, recognized or not recognized, almost every b-school in India seems a beehive of activity. The mood is festive, celebrating a year gone by when campuses broke records in top salaries offered, and almost 100 per cent placements ­ irrespective of size, region or quality of business school. After the year 2001 boom in salaries, for the first time campuses recorded handsome Indian and international salaries. Almost all top performing management schools had to turn away companies.

The institutes also broke records in highest Indian and international salaries. Indian Institute of Management received a total of 477 job offers to its 247 students batch. The same was the scene in other IIM campuses, including newcomers IIM Kozikode and IIM Indore. The Indian School of Business, started in 2001 with its unconventional one-year mba, has been gaining from strength to strength to become the first Indian school to bag the highest international salary of $181,000, and it had to turn away a bulk of 150 companies which offered jobs for its student batch of 273. The scene was no different elsewhere with the industry median salary moving upto around Rs3.7 lakh across 120 schools for which salary data was available. In our list of schools almost 90 per cent reported full placements. Even in the remaining it was more due to students opting out of placement process, rather than the school being incapable of facilitating jobs for all.

Placements apart, many schools in our list reported starting new courses mainly in family and international business, and were also busy opening campuses or branches in other cities. The list included IIM Lucknow, imt Ghaziabad, Icfai, Narsee Monjee, International School of Business and Media, Pune, itm group of institutes, ims group of institutes, Amity School of Business, Delhi, and ibat of Bhubaneshwar.

Roller-coaster ride to continue

B-schools have certainly never had it so good, and indications are that the roller-coaster ride will continue for a while more. The reason: the economy is growing at a faster clip and demand for skilled managers can only go up. Coupled with this is the shortage of good quality business schools which chokes supply, pushing up the premium on b-school graduates. B-schools, especially seasoned ones, already see the writing on the wall and are sprucing their act to stay ahead. Long-term sustainability of the brand can happen only by sustained investment in quality; after all, managers will have to prove their mettle at the workplace and any slip up can boomerang on the reputation of the school. The challenge of course is to get the right faculty in numbers, keep them motivated and updated, and provide a learning ambience necessary for a global scale b-school process happening in our campuses.

"This year's recruitment has been quite unexpected. Practically all the students were placed within a day," explains A.K. Sengupta of sies (South India Education Society) School of Management, New Mumbai. sies is no exception, a quick round of calls to our A+ category listing showed that almost every school in our list not only placed their students within day one, nearly 10 to 20 per cent were placed even earlier. Between 30 to 45 per cent increase in median salaries were reported from this category of schools.

Not just the A+ category, even the next level schools figuring in our A category listing also reported almost similar trends. Part of the reason for a sudden upswing in the b-school fortune is the willingness of the company to look beyond top schools. Already many top companies have moved to tier II and tier III schools to source talent. "We are strengthening our assessment mechanism to identify schools, and we are finding good talent from many schools which are not in our list," says Dilip Mohapatra, head hr of tcs.

Gearing for more

Surprisingly, far from getting complacent about good tidings, almost every b-school is preparing for the next wave. "We have in place a series of calculated investments and infrastructure expecting to scale up to a size no one can guess possible," announces the brash kid on the block Arindam Chaudhry, dean of Indian Institute of Planning and Management. Nine iipm Towers in seven cities and one planned in London, Chaudhry certainly has a lot of stake in the game. Elsewhere, in our list of schools, practically 80 per cent reported that they had done campus additions ranging from Rs40 lakh investment to Rs10 crore plus and these investments are taking place across the country.

Even the usually reticent IIMs who basked in the glory of their own brand name and a market dictated largely by demand rather than supply for long, have suddenly become aggressive innovators pushing ahead with expansion of seats, new course introductions, brand extensions, bevy of tie-ups, large addition to infrastructure and aggressive faculty recruitments, not to speak of adopting global benchmarks like one-year mba, gmat scores for admission, executive mba programmes and e-learning offerings. IIM-A created a flutter by announcing its one-year executive mba aimed at working executives with a handsome price tag upwards of Rs6 lakh excluding the cost of global travel, which comes bundled with the course.

Campuses getting real

While it is obvious that the going is great, why are our schools in a hurry to expand infrastructure, strengthen faculty numbers by offering handsome salaries -- imt and imi surprised many by advertising for faculty positions at nearly 30 to 40 per cent above IIM salaries, not to mention incentives which would almost double the faculty's take -- and go in for an aggressive brand building exercise as if there is no tomorrow?

The reason for this is not far to seek. Global competition is for real even though still a bit far into the future, and expectations of the Indian industry is also very high, even though they have become near desperate to pick up any talent that may come near to semblance of quality. The heat is already being felt with isb, Hyderabad promoted top threesome global schools Kellogg, Wharton and London School of Business being joined by Great Lakes Institute at Chennai and the freshly minted Stansfield Business School of Singapore also based in Chennai. Stansfield is planning 20 look-alikes in different cities at a whopping Rs500-crore project cost by 2008.

Even though the likes of Kellogg, Wharton, Chicago School, Insead and imd Lausanne, which have already made aggressive inroads into Asian, chiefly Chinese and Singaporean, markets, are still not showing enough keenness to enter into India, the real fear is that when they come they would with all guns firing, and it would be late by then, unless Indian schools are ready by all counts.

The schools are aware that not a single top school of the country is accredited by any global accreditation agency nor is there any keenness to use the global benchmark gmat (Graduate Management Admission Test), scores for admissions. A 550 to 600 band of gmat score is considered as acceptable in global top schools, while a first tentative move has been made by the IIM-A to introduce gmat as a means of admission to its one-year executive mba course being planned from the coming academic year 2006. All top ranked schools are also talking of global accreditation and talks are underway with aacsb association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, Equis and amba (Association of mbas) of UK for this purpose by institutes like Management Development Institute, Gurgaon, Institute of Chartered Financial Analysts of India (Icfai) and S.P. Jain.

While regulatory agencies are looking to pushing the schools on a market-oriented mode by raising the bar on quality, there is an universal acceptance of the fact that international benchmarking can be made only through a global accreditation process. "A beginning at least should be made to get Indian accreditation for the courses as well as subjects," says Yadav of AICTE.

At present two streams of accreditation is available, both maintained by the state. The National Board of Accreditation and the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (naac) of ugc. Both bodies have made inroads into quality benchmarking in the country, even though many schools are reticent about the efficacy and practicality of using the state benchmarks.

Elsewhere in the campuses, international business and family businesses are the latest flavour of the month with a number of top-rated schools reporting forays into these subjects. "The coming of World Trade Organisation on the scene has changed ground realities, and even though slow, campuses are realising the need for equipping their managers with knowledge of global business practices," explains Venkatratnam, the newly-appointed director of International Management Institute (imi) of Delhi, fresh from being the head of Gitam Institute of Foreign Trade, Visakhapatnam.

Being pioneers, M.L. Shrikant, executive dean of S.P. Jain and N.M. Kondap, vice-chancellor of Narsee Monjee Institute are happy that their family business mbas have been doing extremely well and more schools are joining the race to offer these courses.

Pressure from industry

"There is tremendous pressure for mbas. The industry is desperate and there are not enough top quality mbas to go around," G.P. Rao, head (hr) of jk group admits. The industry is already feeling the pinch as schools turned away potential recruiters in droves, in the process offering best of the pick for their wards. The number of offers per student had gone up by almost 50 per cent across all top 20 schools in our list. This means on an average each student got more than two to three offers. International recruitment has been highest in the campuses.

"The present boom may have little to do with the skills and promises of the Indian young mba passouts. But to sustain benchmarks and safeguard high salary packages, b-schools have to gear up for more," is the assessment of Biswajir Pattanayak, director of Institute of Management, Bhubaneshwar. He may not be far off the mark, seen by the frenzy of activity around the best campuses around the country. "We are definitely under pressure to build capacity and offer high quality talent as the expectations of even our traditional recruiters have gone up tremendously," admits Pritam Singh, a seasoned b-school administrator and head of mdi Gurgaon, arguably one of the fastest growing b-schools in the country.

The coming executive MBA boom

All the top schools are finally waking up to the reality of catering to a burgeoning professional population seeking to acquire mba qualifications, something which global schools had recognised years earlier much to their delight. IIM-A has joined the race offering a matching one-year mba programme aimed at wooing young working executives rivaling the isb, Hyderabad the true pioneer in this sort of high-priced executive mba education of one-year duration. IIM Kolkata had already introduced its one-year executive mba and mdi has on the drawing board a similar mba from the coming year. S.P. Jain, Narsee Monjee, xim b, imt Ghaziabad and Icfai Business School, Hyderabad among others are in the race for introducing evening mba, part-time mba and distance education mba to cater to this professional population with deep pockets. The lure is also that none of these mbas would need a leg up on the job front as they are either laterally placed or just don't need a fresh job as they would go back to their companies expecting better prospects with their newly minted mba.

The private schools' edge

The post-'90s schools, almost all of them owned by the private sector, has a better chance of survival and sustained growth than the more mature government- or university-led students of greater vintage. Everything from admission, to pedagogy and placements, the schools have freedom to innovate. Take the instance of xime (Xavier Institute of Management and Entrepreneurship, Bangalore started by a veteran management professor and former IIM-B director, in his sixties, Joe Philip. In less than five years of its existence the school has come to be recognised as one of the top rated business schools of the country appearing in our own list of A+ level one schools this year. "We grew based on our core strength of innovation and creativity", explains Philip. The school has systematically developed close rapport with the industry. Almost all rooms in the school are named after one or the other industry or corporate supporter, a classic case of live industry campus interface.

"The limit is set by one's own ambition," says Balasubramaniam of IIMM (Indian Institute of Modern Management), Pune. Taking his own example, he says IIMM started in a small rented premises as part of a primary school, and in less than seven years' time is moving into a Rs50-crore facility. It has earned for itself a place among the fastest growing business schools of the country. Take another example, rims, located in the rich mining districts of Orissa. It has grown from a small unpretentious business school merely five years ago to one of the best nationally recognised schools.

In fact Pune, considered the Oxford of Asia, has a number of examples like that of Balasubramaniam; even though credit should be given to the softspoken S.B. Majumdar of Symbiosis group of Institutions which has a formidable national brand presence. There are five schools from this stable at the moment among almost 30 different schools of higher learning of Symbiosis.

All the growth-oriented schools have one thing in common, namely a bright student pool who might have missed getting admission into some of the premier schools from the media list of the first 25 schools. It is not surprising considering that nearly two lakh students write any of the five tests on offer while there are no more than 3,000 students admission possible in the top schools. The best of the rest obviously gravitate towards these aspiring schools, shoring up their basic student quality.

When it comes to providing content too, many of the schools in the category have an edge over the top schools of greater vintage purely based on their private or trust ownership which gives them considerable freedom when it comes to admissions, faculty recruitments and their compensation, introduction of new courses and of course total focus and freedom to get good placements for their students. "We have introduced a number of new courses and are aggressively pushing for our media management course, introduced for the first time in the country," explains Sunil Karve, vice-chairman of met group of institutions, Mumbai.

However, often business considerations overshadow academic pursuit resulting in a gradual slide in quality. And the institutes can run into rough weather on this account. The case in point is the recent government regulator AICTE notice to Amity Business School Delhi. Rai University also had to close down many of its courses after the University Grants Commission refused to recognise its autonomous status, which was purportedly registered with the Rajasthan government. The institutions are often tempted to go for larger number of students than what the infrastructure can support, cut back on faculty spending and loading of existing faculty with larger number of courses.

It can't be business as usual

The keenness of the big schools to get into the globally benchmarked b-school offerings is understandable as the b-school scene in India has remained far too long extremely chaotic bordering on the bizarre. In terms of range of ownership, size of student enrolments, variety of courses on offer, benchmarks in terms of faculty recruitments, their numbers, type of pedagogical practices... everything has remained unreal.

Take student admissions: a bulk of the Indian schools admit 60 to 90 students while the more adventurous among them could go upto 2,000 or more. Taking our own list of 120 schools into consideration, the range could blow your mind. We have on our list at least six schools that have more than 1,500 students -- mba in insurance, mca or the latest trend, journalism and mass media or even an ma in economics -- while almost 40 per cent of the schools admitted between 60 and 120 students. "Batch size is crucial to get the economies of scale right," explains one private b-school veteran.

As to the faculty/student ratio, while the international norm is around 1 to 10, this range is considered bare minimum, and many top branded schools get by with just a handful of permanent faculty. Some none at all. The trend is to tap visiting faculty and corporate practitioners who may have no commitment nor time to mentor students or update their course offerings. Some of these are big brand names like Symbiosis, Pune, Jamnalal Bajaj, IIMM Pune, and Narsee Monjee, Mumbai. "We use the visiting faculty model which has worked well with us," explains Balasubramaniam of IIMM. Jadhav of Jamnalal Bajaj also says their visiting faculty is "as good as permanent and been with the institute for decades", echoing similar sentiments expressed by the Symbiosis Group of Pune of S.B. Majumdar to justify lack of adequate permanent faculty on roll.

Regulation vs recognition

While the schools are looking at gearing up for the future, the state is also getting its act together after a series of court judgements that brought to focus the poor quality of the higher educational system in the country. The Supreme Court verdict helped to close down almost 110 private universities cleared by Chhattisgarh government en masse was a case in point.

Quality is to be seen and also felt, is an attitude that reflects in today's business schools, indicating a new found wisdom that not just glitz and glamour but quality of curriculum and pedagogy is needed to get ahead in the coming race for top corporate jobs. "Getting AICTE recognition is not a matter of choice and it is also a definitive endorsement of quality of a school," explains R.A. Yadav, vice-chairman of AICTE.

Through a series of unprecedented steps, a new team of AICTE top brass started tightening the AICTE norms leading to a fracas between the regulator and a high profile business school belonging to the post-'90s era, Amity School of Business in Delhi leading to the school being derecognised by the regulator and its students being transferred to other AICTE-recognised institutions in Delhi. The school management led by Ashok Chauhan cried foul by terming the AICTE action as being premeditated, to no avail.

AICTE for its part promises more such action is on the anvil. "We want to clear the system of poor quality and corruption of young minds," says Damodar Acharya, chairman of AICTE. ugc has also been tightening its norms with a view to making the University-led business schools more accountable. "There is no way any school can be run without official sanction," declares R.A. Yadav, vice-chairman of the government regulator. "Self regulation could be the answer," offers Reena Ramachandran, director general, Fortune School, who herself is from the industry. Agrees R.C. Mital, chairman of Medi-caps Institute of Technology and Management, Indore, "Market forces are such that if you don't provide quality you would be out of the business soon."

Can regulation provide an answer? While the likes of Damodar Acharya and Yadav of AICTE feel that quality can be ensured only through state regulation, open marketing enthusiasts like Vipin Gupta Chir, professor at Simmons Women University, Boston advocate the opposite and say the challenge lies somewhere in between.

But a close scrutiny on the ground presents a different picture. In our own list of top category schools a bulk remained outside the official purview and even when it is available the official recognition covers a minuscule percentage of courses offered by the school. "Corporate are responsible for this trend. No one cares to find out whether the school is officially recognised or not," AICTE complaints while on the other hand the schools consider the corporate recognition as its ultimate endorsement of quality. "In a market where the selling point is placement, schools that appeal to the corporate win, never mind they are officially recognised or not. After all corporate are no fools, they would like to get value for their money," Sourya Pattnaik of Rourkela Institute of Management (rims) comments. "We aim to build students with high skills but grounded with human values and I am sure we would get the corporate recognition for our efforts," hopes M.S. Pillai, director of Sadhana School, the first school in India to be set up entirely with alumni help (see Business India, 25 October 2005) as he gears up for placing his first batch of students.

Sustaining quality is priority

The real challenge is to sustain the confidence that the corporate have reposed in the schools this year and make good schools great schools. "Making a good school itself is a great challenge and taking it to the next level is a stupendous task," admits Pandurangrao of Icfai. And he should know. His private university Icfai had sailed through smoothly the crises set by the Supreme Court banning the private universities in Chhattisgarh where it was registered originally along with the other 110-odd private universities which were asked to close down by the Apex court. And it also had no difficulty in getting past the ugc's strict scrutiny before giving Association of Indian University (aiu) recognition. All through the existential crises as it were, the university had moved from strength to strength emerging as one of the fastest growing educational enterprises in the country anchored on perceptible quality. Similar notable achievers in the same league were tapmi of Manipal, Nirma from the House of Karsanbhai Patel and Narsee Monjee from Mumbai.

"Getting the students placed is hardly an achievement, even the relatively high salary package of the current year is not a benchmark. India is surely on the global map and putting our students on par with the global b-school graduates is not an easy task, but one which has to be done," explains Sahay. "We have never had it as good but we plan for more," declares Pritam Singh of mdi, Gurgaon. Both the Delhi schools mdi and imt have raised the bar several notches in academics, new course introduction, faculty compensation, faculty capacity building, and tie up with global schools for faculty and student exchange.

The b-school mantra is quality and we find from our study of nearly 120 schools that almost every school has adopted one or the other benchmark by which we measured their quality.

Raising the bar on admissions

There was also a rise in the average age of the students from 21 to 22.7 across our entire listing of 120 schools, showing that a larger number of schools have been opting for students with more than two years of experience or at least one year. This could also be a reason for the increase in salary offers by companies, as they can obtain people with real industry experience along with the best mba education.

The cut off scores for cat had been 96 per cent across the top 10 list, while it remains almost close to 95 per cent for the first 30 schools listed after top 10. Almost all autonomous schools had accepted cat, gmat and all other national tests. The percentage of engineering students to the total had significantly risen in the case of top schools while the reverse was the case at the bottom end of the list.

Mentoring smaller schools

It is one thing to lament about poor quality of business schools and wax eloquent on what they could do to scale up or take the hard option of shipping out, but it is quite another to take up the leadership to say "let us do it together". Industry veterans and long-term critics like Dharni P. Sinha, Abad Ahmed, Pritam Singh, P.D. Thomas, K.R.S. Murthy, Joe Philip and Devi Singh, have been advocating that there should be some way of handholding of smaller schools so that they can raise their bar on quality.

Industry bodies like All India Management Association and Association of Indian Management Schools see themselves as catalysts in this task by organising workshops and seminars focusing attention on the gaps in the industry but nothing more. IIM-A has been conducting a successful annual faculty programme for directors from smaller schools for capacity building, which is just about the only serious efforts of outreach of bigger players in the market. Almost all big schools are listed as partners with the AICTE's Quality Improvement Programme (qip) to conduct Faculty Development Programmes of one to two days' duration.

"We have taken the first real step in mentoring smaller schools," says Pritam Singh of mdi. The school has chalked out a plan to mentor at least 10 schools and is busy shortlisting prospective candidate schools. Sahay of imt not to be outdone is also talking about a similar mentoring programme confined to near region schools of Meerut and Ghaziabad. "Schools like ours certainly would be happy to work with larger ones on curriculum development and pedagogic quality," says Promod Patak, head of Department of Management Studies of Indian School of Mines Dhanbad.

Age of technology schools

National Institute for Industrial Engineering (nitie) Mumbai has been a true pioneer in technology management education in the country and it continues to ride the waves as the largest sectoral school in the country with one of the finest campuses to teach technology and management to future managers. The school has always remained in the big league and is unafraid of the emerging competition from the other well entrenched business schools and also the newly emerging powerhouses belonging to the Indian Institutes of Technology (iit), one of which literally shares the compound with the school.

The nation's pride, iits, the coveted national technology campuses of the country acclaimed globally for their top quality talent, have done extremely well for themselves even in the management education front. So much that with the lead given by iit Delhi, technology management schools like the iits are talking of a common business school campus of the and reach unprecedented in the industry, something which IIMs with their brand presence did not do all these years. Collectively IIMs have size and presence in terms of campus space, faculty numbers and batch strength like any other global top campus like Kellogg, Wharton, even though owing to historical reasons they have remained competitors to each other while enjoying the collective brand identity. In fact, even the two new IIMs at Kozhikode and Indore are individual entities competing with their peers for market presence.

Like their alma mater, the iit business schools without exception have been supported by alumni of the iits to which they are attached. Three iits at Mumbai, Delhi and Kharagpur have already caught the attention of the industry with their students being considered on par with any IIM, while the rest of the management schools in technology campuses of Kanpur and Chennai along with Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore are slowly moving up the ladder.

Global MBA and Indian jobs

Competition is growing from within and without, even though both in terms of the quality of mba offered domestically and the managerial talent for running Indian enterprises is also growing in the process. Visa restrictions imposed by the US after 11 September may have deterred many foreign aspirants from pursuing management studies in America, but not Indians. The number of Indians taking the Graduate-Management Aptitude Test, a test required for admission in American Business Schools, increased by 19 per cent reaching 7,123 last year, a recent Business Week report said.

The Class of 2007 at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina has its highest number of Indian students in the past seven years, with a total of 20 out of about 275.

Though the overall applicant pool decreased by 9 per cent last year at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University, which usually receives close to 2,000 applications, the number of Indian mba applicants rose by 16 per cent.

Way ahead

The way ahead seems even more exciting. For instance, IIM-C reports that its summer placements had been one of the best in its history endorsing its strength in the finance area. The institute attracted a host of investment banks including Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, J.P. Morgan, Deutsche Bank, Barclays Capital, hsbc and ing investment bank which offered diverse functions and locations.

News from other top schools also indicates similar trends. Later placements and pre-placement offers are also going up sharply with companies vying with each other to get a foothold into the schools lest they should be disappointed in picking up the best and brightest from among the top campuses.

"I am confident that the trend is the same across good business schools," acknowledges Anil Sachdeva of Grow Talent. Agrees Ramakrishna of Zenith Consultancy, Hyderabad, a recruiting firm, "Entry-level jobs were never as good and I expect the trend to continue. What is interesting is that demand is from all segments of the industry and not just it, banking or consultancy as used to be case," he says.

So where is the catch? Supply will be the biggest driver still, and in the process it will be difficult to say how exactly Indian b-school graduates will fare when it comes to global competition. "The future is not about India but about enterprises that are globally oriented and Indian b-schools like elsewhere have to prepare their students to face a rapidly globalising world," admits Ashwani Gupta of Honeywell. Isolated instances like IIMM teaching its students Chinese, Amity teaching German, and Symbiosis' network offering a range of foreign languages should be replicated elsewhere. Besides language skills and cultural orientation, we need to talk in terms of getting the schools to teach doing business with the World Trade Organisation something except for institutes like ift, Fortune, Bhadruka and Gitam very few others are offering.

The bane of the industry faculty shortage will be sharper, which would mean there will be less experimentation with the curriculum that is currently on offer. The saving grace however, is more schools are offering fellowship and Ph.D programmes and are actively encouraging the corporate sector to get into teaching. The launching of executive mba courses has also brought a lot of experienced industry people into the campus, some of whom are already joining the ranks of the institutes to reach at least part time. "I am seeing more participation by the industry people in curriculum development and teaching", reports Ashok Kapoor who runs the executive mba programme at mdi, Gurgaon. When we visit the campuses next, things definitely would not remain the same.