FMS is focused on the needs of industry: V K Bhalla

CURRICULA

V K Bhalla

The Faculty of Management Studies (FMS), Delhi University, has featured in the top-10 B-schools in several surveys for the past three years. But the dean, Prof V K Bhalla, is clear that surveys that talk about best and second-best B-schools don't matter.

"We are more concerned with trying to gauge what industry wants and then working on that. In fact, that is what the aim of all B-schools should be," he says.

And that is why, he reveals, FMS has come up with the first two-year full-time MBA programme in services management for 44 students, due to start this July.

A distinguished researcher, teacher, and author of as many as 22 books on the capital markets, financial systems and management, Bhalla has been with the institute since 1978 when he joined as professor of finance.

He took over as the dean of the institute in January 2004. Several top executives in the world of finance have been his students. Not surprising then, that he can't help making comparisons between MBA students now and 15 years ago. Perhaps the biggest difference is in the increasing number of people opting for a management course after having worked for a while.

"Students nowadays are more career conscious. And they are more demanding of the faculty "" they want more case studies, do their research and come up with several perspectives, which they want the faculty to analyse and so on," he says.

A paucity of top-class faculty is an issue that plagues most B-schools today. FMS is an exception. Bhalla points out the permanent faculty strength at FMS is 30, all of them PhDs "" FMS is perhaps the only B-school in India to boast of such a highly-qualified faculty, he says.

Academic qualifications apart, several members of the faculty act as consultants to both private and public sector companies and take part in the board meetings and issues relating to corporate governance.

They are thus able to share these first-hand experiences with students. Needless to say, the visiting and guest faculty runs into hundreds.

And since it is under the Delhi University umbrella, FMS can also make use of the faculty at other departments.

"Management education is inter-disciplinary. So, if there's a module we feel an economics teacher will be better equipped to handle, all we have to do is request the Delhi School of Economics to send us such faculty," Bhalla says.

There are other, non-academic advantages to being part of a university. Thanks to subsidies from the university, FMS is able to charge students an annual fees of just Rs 10,000 for a two-year MBA degree course.

"Being affiliated to a national university also means that one has more credibility than other institutes. For instance, we have just struck an understanding with Harvard Business School to exchange journals," Bhalla says.

The only flip side of being in the university set up, as the dean points out, is that at times the decision-making process is painfully slow. Even so, FMS reviews its syllabus every three to four years after feedback from industry. And it is still fighting authorities that want the institute to do away with its own 35-year-old written admission test.

Interestingly, FMS is probably the only institute that has an extempore session as part of the admission procedure. Students are asked to speak for two minutes on any topic "" from currents affairs to fashion trends. Bhalla says it helps the panel gauge the student's efficiency at putting his thoughts together and ability to communicate.

After the new management course is in order, next on the agenda for Bhalla is increasing student-industry interaction. "There is no substitute for what a student learns on the field," he points out.

So, apart from summer training, there will be more industry people and policymakers coming to address the students as guest and visiting faculty.

Students' interaction with their foreign counterparts is also slated to increase in the coming months with more exchange programmes on the agenda.

And does the dean get time to teach? "Absolutely," Bhalla says, "I am a teacher first. Everything else comes second."