Picture this - the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, the premier business school in the country, ranked 64th on the list of the top 100 B-schools in the world, does not figure among the top 200 business schools in terms of research conducted in the discipline.
"There is a severe fund crunch in the IIMs for any research programme, which is forcing the institutes to have fewer research programmes," said dean, IIM Lucknow, Devi Singh. Singh, however, refused to divulge the amount of funding that the institution received only for its research programmes.
The six IIMs put together produce only a mere 25 PhD students in a year, of whom barely five go for a career in academics and the remaining choose a corporate career. Compare this to the United States where the top B schools produce over 100 PhD students in a year, of which only 20 go for a corporate career.
The fund crunch is so severe that IIM Ahmedabad students have created a corpus for conducting research, which will be worth Rs 2 crore (Rs 20 million) in 2011.
In comparison, Harvard Business School raised $600 million in only three years. Moreover, in India there is a great disparity between the salaries offered to corporate professionals and research fellows. While the salary differential is 45 per cent in India, it is only 20 per cent in the US.
"The graduates earn as much as Rs 100,000 per month in the corporate world and a mere Rs 15,000 as a research fellow at IIMs. With lesser funds, there is little scope to match corporate salary offers," said director, IIM Bangalore, Prakash Apte.
The IIMs are trying to arrest this low interest in research by allowing IIM graduates with a few years of experience to join academics.
"We encourage IIM graduates with five years of experience to join research programmes as an assistant professor," added Apte.Do you want to discuss stock tips? Do you know a hot one? Join the Stock Market Investments Discussion Group
