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	One of the lakh students who appeared for the CAT, merely 180 got selected to the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A). This year, thankfully, the number is going to double. Dr. Bakul Dholakia, Director, IIM-A, discusses his expansion plans with RADHIKA SACHDEV · When will the new campus I be ready? The first phase of construction will be over before the commencement of this. academic year i.e. June 2003. We will then have seven new dormitories to accommodate 300 more students. five new classrooms and 10 smaller seminar rooms. The student intake into our main PGPM programme will double from the present 180 to 280. · Won't this dilute the qualify of education at IIM-A? Not in the least. Our pedagogy is such that beyond a point, any increase in the student group size will make the case study methodology unwieldy. As we are committed to keeping all our previous features intact, even after the expansion, the campus will remain fully residential (even for local students), the occupancy will remain single and all students will have Internet connectivity and direct telephone line facilty in their rooms, as is usual now. Plus, the new classrooms will be air-conditioned and equipped with hi-tech gadgetry. We are taking utmost care not to choke the system. · Will this also translate into an increase in the fee? Not necessarily. In the past as well, our fees have been going up only in line with the general inflation rate. I don't think we would need to go for any out-of-turn hike this year, either. · What about the faculty? Are they geared to take on the additional student load? That's one area I am a little concerned about. Obviously, I cannot offer the same compensation packages as the industry, so I keep losing my experienced staff to them. Worse, the salary gap continues to widen. However, I am chalking out an extensive HR plan with my senior faculty members and I hope it will work well. · Any new elements in your courseware? We keep introducing new electives every year. Almost 50 percent of the 27 electives developed over the past three years were new electives. Some of these include: retail marketing, global marketing in multinational corporations, cross-cultural marketing, infrastructure financing, debt markets, organisational decline and turnaround management, business contracts and property rights, to name just a few. · Don't you think 15 electives in one year is like spreading knowledge too thin? We are in the business of producing "specialists in general management," and this only comes with good range of subjects. Our entire system is driven by faculty initiative and market demand. So long as there is a demand for a particular subject and we have the faculty interested in building a programme around it, we will continue to expand our courseware. The student has the freedom to switch these resources. That is the beauty and the flexibility of the system. . The HRD Ministry recently said that funds to the IITs and IIMs will now be tied to their research record. What's your comment on this? We are most happy with this decision. It will certainly benefit us. . A recent Economic Times survey concluded that IIM-A has slipped from its No. I position and been overtaken by IIM-Bangalore. Your comments please? The survey that you mention is based on student perception thought I do not know who did it and when it was done. I will also admit that this year, we did lose four students to IIM-Bangalore; because of the tension in Gujarat. Nonetheless, the recruiters' opinion in the same survey continues to favour IIM-A above any other B-school in the country. In any case, we don't have much faith in these surveys and have always fought shy of participating in them. . Any signals on the state of the economy on the placement front? The signals are really all positive. I don't think there is any cause for too much worry. The clouds do appear to be lifting from this yearly placements.

Date : 1/7/2009
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