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Indian School of Business kicks off operations

Syed Amin Jafri in Hyderabad

The Indian School of Business, billed as the first of its kind global business school in India, started its first post-graduate programme in management in Hyderabad on Sunday. The formal inauguration of the school will take place in December this year.

Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu inaugurated the programme at a ceremony on ISB campus at Manikonda on the city outskirts. The ISB's post-graduate course is a one-year programme with its first batch comprising 130 students with diverse educational and working backgrounds.

ISB's first dean Pramath Raj Sinha said: "We have set for ourselves the benchmark of what it makes a world class business school in terms of profile of students and faculty and the infrastructure. ISB will rewrite history in this country."

"The first batch of students is an incredible group of young men and women whose GMAT score of 690 is bettered only by the students enrolled by Stanford University Business School. 18 of them are gold medallists in various disciplines," Sinha said.

He pointed out that they included high achievers like a captain of the Indian golf team, a mountaineer who scaled a 18,600-feet peak, an Army major who fought the Kargil war and won a Vir Chakra besides leading a UN Mission in Somalia, and two girls who participated in Miss India-Nivea and another beauty contest.

Earlier, addressing a media conference, ISB chairman Rajat Gupta announced the appointment of Dr Pramath Sinha as the first full-time Dean of the School. Dr Sinha has been the CEO of the ISB since 1999.

The appointment was cleared by the Board of Governors of ISB, comprising the who's who of Indian business and MNCs rated among the Fortune 500 companies.

"Our aim is to create world-class managers and business leaders. The impression that ISB is just for the MNCs is not true. There are lot of Indian companies looking at ISB excitedly. We are very well positioned to serve not just the MNCs but also the Indian companies," Sinha pointed out.

The students would be required to pay Rs 1 million towards fees and boarding and lodging charges for the one-year programme. The school is coming up on a 250-acre campus at a massive outlay of Rs 3 billion.

Giving the profile of the "founding batch" of 130 students, Sinha said that they include 110 men and 20 women. As many as 99 are single and 31 are married. Their average age worked out to 26 years with 4.6 average years of work experience. Only one student is a foreigner and the rest are Indians, including NRIs.

Almost 60 per cent of them worked abroad for an year or more. Their previous employers included American Express, Accenture, Arthur Andersen, Citibank, GE Capital, Hewlett Packard, Siemens, Jardine Fleming Standard Chartered Bank and Indian companies such as ITC, Wipro, ICICI, Hindustan Lever, Infosys, Reliance, Satyam, Dr Reddy's Lab, Telco etc.

The ISB, affiliated with Kellogg Graduate School of Management (Northwestern University), Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania) and London Business School, has its visiting faculty of 16 for the first batch drawn from Wharton, Kellogg, London Business School and other prestigious business schools at the Universities of Chicago, Minnesota, Northern Illinois, Stanford, Duke and from Emory.

The ISB would have five permanent faculty members, three of whom have already joined the school, Sinha explained.

Sumantra Ghoshal, founding dean of ISB said that the school would start short-duration executive education programmes from November this year. Four such programmes of five-day duration each would be conducted in the current year.

However, the fees structure for the EDP was yet to be worked out but it would be around half to two-thirds of what the world-class business schools charge elsewhere (i.e. 1,000 dollars a person per day).

Rajat Gupta said the ISB aimed to be among the top 10 schools in the world. "In fact, our aspirations are very high. We want to be among the top three or top five business schools in the world," he added.

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