Companies yet to warm up to IITs

Pre-placement offers that have been received till date are yet to show promise

Unlike the premier Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), where around 15 per cent of students have already received pre-placement offers (PPOs) till date, the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) perceive the flow of PPOs this year to be “very slow”.

PPOs are placement offers to final year students who are, or were trainees, in the company during their internships. The final placement process at IITs will start from December and go on till April-May.

“Last year the slowdown started post September, and the PPOs were secured by that time. Though we did receive some regret letters later, overall the situation was better. PPOs, so far this year, do not show much promise,” rued an IIT professor on condition of anonymity.

At IIT-Delhi, meanwhile, PPOs have just started flowing in and the institute expects core engineering and IT companies to be major recruiters. It will be placing around 1,000 students this year. “Traditionally our recruiters have hired in small numbers of up to 15 per company. Last year, we had 225 companies on campus and similar number are expected this year. We are expecting most of our past recruiters to come to campus,” said Kushal Sen, Prof-In-Charge, Training And Placement Cell, IIT-Delhi.

At IIT-Roorkee, FMCG major ITC and engineering major Schlumberger have already visited the campus. The institute will be placing around 600 MTech students and 500 BTech students. The institute achieved 88 per cent placement in BTech and 55 per cent placement in MTech last year.

At IIT-Guwahati, companies like ITC, Goldman Sachs, Microsoft and Adobe have been in touch with the students and made PPOs. Nearly 10-12 students have bagged PPOs and the number will go up in the coming days, the institute says. “Placements haven’t been that good so far but with the recession effect slowing down in India, we are expecting placements to look up from the next month onwards. Some of the companies that deffered hiring last time have shown interest in coming to the campus,” said Saurabh Basu, Faculty In-Charge, Training & Placement, IIT-Guwahati.

The institute says it expects public sector companies to be a major recruiter on the campus this year. “We have a branch of Math and Computing where students are looking forward to working with financial organisations. We are expecting some of the financial companies to hire students from this batch,” adds Basu.

The institute has invited 250-odd companies to the campus this year. Nearly 650 students will be eligible for placements of which there are 329 BTech students, 200 MTech students and rest PHDs. Last year, the BTech branch witnessed 87per cent placement while the MTech batch had 55 per cent of its students placed. Some of the recruiters for the 2008-09 session included Adobe, IOCL, Sail, BEL, John Deere, BHEL, Cognizant, Microsoft, Godrej and RIL.

At IIT-Kanpur, companies have begun visiting the campus for pre-placement talk and internship interviews. The institute will have the first batch of around 15 MSc Economics students sitting for placements this year too. It is already in talks with banks for the same. Around 500 BTech students will participate in placements this year. IIT-Kanpur started a five-year programme in MSc economics in 2005. This year (2008-09 placements) number of students recruited by MNCs, from the seven IITs, came down to 1606 against a total of 3,031 selection in 2008, according to the Ministry of Human Resource and Development.