On an oppressively hot mid-afternoon in the western Indian city of Ahmedabad, a man and a young boy sleep on a narrow canvas cot on the sidewalk. Mothers in mismatched saris care for their babies as older children scamper around in filthy rags. In a few hours, smoke will hang heavy in the air as the women cook dinner over open fires.
The dozen or so desperately poor families who have claimed this dusty stretch of sidewalk as their home live sandwiched between a traffic-choked street and a tall red-brick wall.
Behind the barrier is another world: The sprawling, manicured campus of India’s top business school and the globe’s most selective, with nearly 800 applicants for every spot.
The Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A), sits at the top of the country’s rapidly growing business education industry, whose degrees are seen as essential for landing high-paying careers in the nation’s booming economy.
Business education has become the default path of study for young adults in India’s middle- and upper-classes, offering prized credentials that garner instant respect, chart bright futures – and even feature prominently in the matrimonial ads that appear in newspapers here.
Students walk on campus at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. The business school is the most prestigious in India, with nearly 800 applicants for every spot.
“It is considered sort of a passport for getting a managerial job, a junior executive job,” said Abraham Koshy, a marketing professor who is director of IIM-A's two-year graduate program. “The MBA is considered a sort of finishing school.”
Indians’ interest in MBAs has grown in tandem with the flourishing economy, which, despite the global recession, expanded by about 7 per cent in the 2009-10 fiscal year. In 1991, the government began enacting a series of reforms that transformed India from state control and high tariffs toward more open-market principles that have stoked white-hot economic growth. The country now has some 1,600 graduate business schools – up from about 50 in 1991 – which churn out an estimated 130,000 new degree holders each year.
“The demand is very high because people see MBA as the one course which will make them employable,” said Rashmi Bansal, who studied at IIM-A and wrote a book on some of its graduates. “MBA is really seen as a kind of basic degree that everyone must have. Rightly or wrongly, that’s what they think … that your education isn’t complete unless you’ve done an MBA.”
Given the massive interest, business schools in Canada and other countries are increasingly looking to India for both recruitment and expansion. York University’s Schulich School of Business, for example, began offering an MBA in conjunction with a school in Mumbai earlier this year and plans to open a site in Hyderabad by 2013 if the Indian Parliament passes a bill to allow foreign universities to set up full-fledged campuses.
“India offers clearly the best opportunity for a foreign institution in terms of demand for quality MBAs,” said Dezso Horvath, dean of Schulich. “The demand is endless.”
Nowhere is that more evident than at the legendary IIM-A, which was established in 1961 on a campus designed by American architect Louis Kahn in Ahmedabad, a former industrial city 550 kilometres north of Mumbai.
Getting into IIM-A is more difficult than securing admission to Harvard and the world’s other top-drawer business schools. Last year, 238,765 students applied for 310 spots, an acceptance rate of only 0.13 per cent. By contrast, Harvard Business School admits 10.3 per cent of applicants.
However, IIM-A’s selective entrance policy is more a function of domestic demand than world-class quality. The school ranked 99th overall in The Economist’s MBA survey last fall, which called it, nonetheless, the “leading business school in the subcontinent.”
