The best and the rest

When the Association of Indian Management Schools was set up in 1988 to work as the professional association of management education, there were about 100 B-Schools in India. The number of schools has grown by leaps and bounds thereafter, and now they stand at more than 2,000 including those that are outside the purview of the All India Council for Technical Education, the central regulatory body for technical education. More than half a million students write the national admission tests to get into the hallowed precincts of India’s best business schools. By some accounts there are about 250-300 applications for every single seat in some of the leading B-Schools — here I am not even talking of the Indian Institutes of Management.

All this is not to say that our students get the same quality everywhere — there are also those that lack quality faculty and facilities. In fact, I have read in various blogs about licensed institutes whose infrastructure and faculty exist only on paper!

I am presenting these figures here to prove just one point — the great importance we attach to management education in India. And that is simply the reason we have taken up the task of putting together this guide to B-Schools for you year after year. The avid follower of Indian Management would have noticed that we have advanced the publication by about four months — that has been done with an eye to making the decision-making process easier for students and prospective employers alike. As you go along, you would also see some changes we have introduced in the way we have ranked the business schools this year. We hope all this would make the study more comprehensive and robust. Coming back to the survey, our conversations with students and teachers at various B-Schools has thrown up a few problems faced by these institutes and I would like to mention one of them here: It’s the shortage of faculty. This, to some extent is met by visiting faculty or practicing managers who take time out for students.

All said, we are happy to note that corporate India — and some state governments as well — has started considering business schools as its partners in progress.

So here it is, your most authoritative guide to B-Schools in India.