By Our Special Correspondent
Daijiworld Media Network - Panaji
Panaji, Aug 30: The Indian B-Schools are adapting their syllabus to the economic slowdown witnessed by the country while grooming the neo-managers who will take on the corporate world in couple of years, the experts said.
“Our curriculum structure is built on “practice” rather than just “theory”, so that the students would be better equipped to face the ground realities of the market, thereby being of true value in rebuilding the economy,” Dr B K Murty, Dean, International Academy of Management & Entrepreneurship (IAME), Bangalore, said during an interview on email.
The Bangalore-based institute claims to have adopted the syllabus conducive to the Indian environment instead of blindly coping American systems.
“India being the emerging economic powerhouse, adapting the known management principles to Indian scenario and to develop our own systems would be the smart way of helping India to better cope with the recession as well as make it ready for fast growth when the recession ends,” Dr Murty, who heads the institute in Kanakapura area of India’s IT hub of Bangalore, stated.
The B schools in India’s economic capital of Mumbai are not indifferent to the trends.
“We first identify what exact skills corporate needs in coming year and groom those students who are willing to take up the assignments and co-train them in partnership with the concerned corporate in a process called ‘externships’ every day afternoon along with academic inputs provided in the morning,” Dr Sunil Rai, CEO, Mumbai Business School, said.
Dr Rai said that the school co-creates required talent in partnership with corporate thus provide managers that are actually needed and not raw talent that needs grooming to suit the corporate.
The school knowing well that the future managers will have to face turbulent times have adopted initiatives under personal leadership segment preparing them on how to self manage in the stressful situation.
Back in Goa, state’s apex management institute, Goa Institute of Management, which is tagged as one amongst the top 20 indian B schools, have carved out its syllabus mulling over the recessionary trends.
“Our syllabus is updated every year. This year during the update the impact of the recession on the managerial job market in India was discussed and taken into consideration while changing the syllabus,” P F X D'Lima, Director, Goa Institute of Management, said.
Even as preparing their pupil for the worst, the tutors are optimistic that the circumstances are going to change.
“We should realize that India needs to be managed the Indian way, not the western way. The futility of the western way has been exposed by the Sub Prime crisis as well as the Satyam fiasco. Japanese, after the war, and China grew because of their own management systems rather than being clones of the west,” Dr Murty opined.
He said that the need is to convert India into value based economy rather than cost based. “Our IT juggernaut has been tugging along primarily due to costs being low rather than value being high,” the dean added.
Adds Dr Sunil Rai, CEO, Mumbai Business School,``actually in India it is technically not recession, it is slow down. Corporate is already fighting it well. Maruti posted growth in sales, Tata Nano has been oversubscribed, infrastructure projects are well on the way.”
“FM’s growth plan will unfold in about a years time, which we ought to give them. The way government has managed recovery of Satyam and arrested fiscal uncertainty by appropriate actions by RBI are indicating optimism,” he stated.