This finds an echo in Prof R.A. Yadav, director, lbsim, Delhi. "What I tell my students is that if you learn a bit less of marketing and finance, it’s OK. But what you must learn is a strong value system and discipline. These are the qualities that will serve you throughout life, in every situation." Says Lt Gen R. Sarin, director-general, Amity: "We regularly have swamis coming to our campus to lecture the students. We need to give our students a holistic education." Students spend about 10 per cent of their working hours on self-analysis and developing their emotional quotient and problem-solving capabilities.
At Delhi’s fore School of Management, president Ashok Varma is quite clear what he is concentrating on. "If you pay peanuts you get monkeys," he says. "We pay our professors almost mnc-level salaries, therefore we have a great faculty to boast of." fore has 34 full-time professors and an equal number of visiting professors. It has more than half a dozen former iim, irma as well as iit professors on its faculty and its director is the former director of iim Lucknow. It also has professors who have left foreign banks and multinational companies to take up teaching assignments.
"In the last three to four years, we have had 100 per cent placement. The only difference between us and the iims is that all their students get placed in the first hour while ours take three days," says Dr Seema Sanghi, joint director. Varma and Sanghi argue that the difference in salary between a fore graduate and an iim graduate is not more than Rs 50,000 annually if the two were to be picked up by the same company. They believe iim students have a cut-above-the-rest attitude while those coming from non-iims are far more down to earth.
Clearly, what the new schools lack in pedigree they try to make up through aggression and Indianness. "We are a simulator of business, we lay a lot of emphasis on entrepreneurship. We teach our students to be positive, aggressive and resilient," says Varma. "In addition to the best curriculum, best teaching methodology, best infrastructure, an institute must also imbibe in its students great qualities and virtues in the area of behavioural sciences and also give them values and morals," declares Chauhan.
