The Punjab government is setting up a Knowledge City in Mohali, which will include an estimated Rs 300 crore campus for the Indian School of Business (ISB), two institutes for Science and Education and Nanotechnology, and a Biotechnology Incubator. The total project cost is pegged at Rs 1,200-1,300 crore, and is expected to be operational by 2012.
For the second ISB campus in Mohali (the first one in Hyderabad cost around Rs 200 crore), the Punjab government is leasing 70 acres of land for 99 years at Re 1 per acre annually.
Besides, four founder supporters of ISB — Analjit Singh, CMD of Max India, Rakesh Bharti Mittal, VCMD of Bharti Enterprises, Sunil Kant Munjal, MD & CEO of Hero Corporate Service, and Atul Punj, chairman of the Punj Lloyd Group — will invest Rs 50 crore each, totalling Rs 200 crore. The ISB Board, on its part, will invest the remaining Rs 100 crore.
The campus will have 280 seats for its Post Graduate Programme (PGP) and several short-duration executive education programmes, which will accommodate around 750 professionals.
The academic sessions at the campus will commence from 2012. The ISB faculty will teach on both campuses and all standards and the admission process will be centralised. It will have a permanent faculty of 15-20 professors, while there will also be visiting faculty from the Hyderabad campus. The faculty may be hired in Mohali and some from Hyderabad.
“There will also be two-way video conferencing lectures between the two campuses,” M Rammohan Rao, dean, ISB, told mediapersons here.
The ISB campus will have four ‘centres of excellence’ offering specialisations in the PGP. These specialist institutes are Max India Institute of Healthcare Management, Bharti Institute of Public Policy, BML Munjal Institute of Manufacturing and Operation Excellence and Punj Lloyd Institute of Physical Infrastructure Management.
“These institutes are a part of the ISB campus in Mohali. The founder members will have no influence over the operations of the institute and will only give their inputs for faculty hiring and the curriculum design,” added Rao.
ISB’s existing associate schools — the Wharton School and Kellogg School of Management — will support the Mohali campus in the latter’s academic programmes. Commenting on alliances with new international schools, Rao said that they might look for new alliances in future.