All quality paradigms are on test in our premier campuses, be it in admissions, accreditation, revenue sources, faculty, placements, globalization, student and faculty exchanges, social commitment and of course the uncharted competition likely to arrive in with the GATS General Agreement for Trade in Services (GATS) biting in after 2005. How are the schools coping from our list? The overall impression is that the usual complacency and supremacy of the superleaguers has gone and in its place there is a renewed sense of optimism and willingness to concede competition and work around it.

More schools are also talking about globalization by reaching out and also benchmarking their processes to global standards. Along with a fight for supremacy, the schools are also realizing the advantage of competitive collaboration--competitors coming together for profit--a normal phenomenon in modern corporate world.

Everyone is expanding their infrastructure, increasing batch sizes, introducing new executive management programmes, part time MBAs and pushing ahead with more international tie ups for both faculty and students. They are encouraging faculty to publish books and papers, bringing out quality journals of management, adding more technology and computers to their campuses and seriously preparing for a foray in e-learning.

Most of the schools are taking a hard look at their course offerings, pedagogy, credit hours, both total number and content of their electives and of course scouring around to get specialist faculty to teach state of the art courses. "The course offering is certainly globalscale but content and delivery are found wanting in Indian campuses", observes Prof P G Apte, Director of IIM Bangalore. It is not unusual for instance to find 60 to 80 electives and more than 20 core courses on offer which contrasts with an average of 15 or 16 core courses and 30 to 35 electives in any of the superleague schools. to Some of the technology campuses in our list are doing one better by increasing their sectoral research, strengthening their linkages with the engineering campuses and other scientific institutions, looking at frontier research areas and launching courses which should keep them distinct from run of the mill MBA schools. Also while the IITs operate with smaller batch strength of around 30 the rest of the top schools including IIMs are hard pressed to expand their seats. The overall the trend is to rope in as many students as possible as most schools still operate on a revenue model based on fee income. While excitement is mounting faculty is doing to be biggest disappointment, everyone, including the leader, IIM A are desperately looking for faculty.

Complacency is gone

Complacency is giving place to competitive spirit, albeit slowly as the top b-schools girdle up to meet the unknown competition from within through quality paradigm. " Quality compliance is not an empty rhetoric anymore. Most would agree that quality is the only unique selling proposition (USP) for a b-school, be it the IIM or the me too teaching shop in some remote part of the country, a factor never considered as important so far in an industry which is still supply driven with the top school getting between 4000 to 5000 applications for every single seat. A record 1.2 lakh candidates wrote Common Aptitude Test (CAT) administered by IIMs last year. Even the high priced Indian School of Business ISB, Hyderabad attracted nearly 1600 aspirants for 160-odd seats last year.

Structural problems remain

Many of the structural problems of the b-schools however, still remain. These relate to the way the ownership, faculty quality and adequacy, red tape in university system, inconsistent and poor quality of curriculum, pedagogy and governance, student quality and admission process, placement process and finally the continued mushrooming of institutions of dubious standing, which neither the regulator AICTE, the University Grants Commission UGC, nor the institutions themselves through their common forums like AIMA All India Management Association and AIMS Association of Indian Management Schools ha