'What matters most is the quality of placements'

Bidya S Sahay took over from C V Baxi as the new director of Gurgaon-based Management Development Institute (MDI) on April 1, 2009. He was director at the Institute of Management Technology (IMT), Ghaziabad, since 2005. Prior to that, he was the Dean (Research and Consultancy) and Professor of Operations Management at MDI. In a chat with Kirtika Suneja, he shares his plans for the institute where he worked for nearly nine years. Edited excerpts:

How does it feel to come back to MDI after 4 years?
I was with MDI for nine years where I was in-charge of the doctoral and graduate programmes. It feels like coming back home, though a lot of new programmes have been added. The faculty has also changed and more people have joined.

What will be your focus areas now?
Now, we will focus on students and policy as we want to put MDI on the global map. For this, we need international accreditation to raise the bar. We are already accredited by the Association of MBAs (AMBA) and South Asian Quality Assurance (SAQS) and are looking at more such accreditation.

Are there any challenges on the faculty front?
There is always an acute shortage of good faculty. So, we are trying to attract good faculty from both India and abroad. Moreover, we feel that the faculty should also focus on research and consulting apart from imparting training and their regular teaching commitments. Faculty members also need external exposure. So, we would want our faculty to organise joint conferences with the industry and other international institutes. Currently, our faculty strength stands at 80.

You are emphasising on research...
Yes, because research is very close to me. I personally focus on supply chain management and now, as its offshoot, I am also doing research on humanitarian logistics. However, at MDI, the research areas are operations management, marketing and finance, among others. We have around 40 doctoral students and want to encourage them by doing collaborative research with the government and industry.

How important are foreign alliances here?
MDI already has around 50 tie-ups with international universities and this is important for us to have a place in the global map. Now, we want to partner with some of the top business schools of the world. Collaborations are an ongoing process and we want to focus on organising joint events and conferences with universities of international repute.

How do you see MDI expanding in terms of campuses, etc?
As of now, we have this campus. Though we are always open to new ideas for the institute’s development, we don’t plan to increase the student intake this year. The admissions for the academic session are going on and there will be no major change.

Placements across B-schools have been affected by the economic crisis. How does the future look?
We have been able to achieve 100 per cent placements but what matters most is the quality of placements. The existing recruiters have reduced the student intake and new companies have come for placements. Going ahead, there should be no problem in placing students but there will be challenge in maintaining that quality.

Do you feel students had to compromise on salaries or job profiles this year?
There was more of a correction in the salaries. There has been a fall in the increase in salaries and that happened because of the global slowdown.