Nagpur Today.
The Vidarbha Economic Development Council (VED), mooted the establishment of an IIM way back in 1996 and persevered for it all these years. With Fadnavis taking the lead an announcing the setting up a an IIM in Nagpur, this is a dream come true for VED and Nagpurians, exulted Devendra Parekh, President, VED.
This would reinforce VED’s desire to make Nagpur an iconic education hub, said a jubilant Rahul Upganlawar, Secretary General, VED. He further stated that the rationale behind it is that more students would get benefit of quality education at an affordable cost, backward and scheduled classes would get included in the growth mechanism as they should not be excluded from expansion and there would be balanced overall economic and social development here.
With management institutes of repute in Mumbai like the top-ranked JBIMS and the autonomous Narsee Monjee and Pune’s University Department and Symboisis, an IIM in Nagpur in Vidarbha was long overdue. Of the 13 IIMs in the country, some have been set up in small places like Kozikode (Kerala), Rohtak (Haryana), Tiruchirapalli (TN), Udaipur (Rajasthan) and Kashipur (Uttarakhand). Nagpur also has several locational advantages over these other places and to boot it is also the second capital of Maharashtra.
The only University Department of Business Management under Nagpur University is lying neglected for more than 30 years since its establishment (1969) and its infrastructure remains very poor due to the meagre resources allocated by the University and step-motherly treatment given to the Department.
The only national level institute in Vidarbha, Institute of Management Technology-Nagpur (IMT), is 35 kms away on Nagpur-Katol road offers PGDM course with sanctioned intake of 360 each year and offering specialisation in marketing, human resources and information technology.
There is also a reckless expansion of institutes imparting management education without improvement in quality of both teachers/students hence a large number of seats are vacant this year in spite of two common entrance tests. Students appearing for the CAT examination are thereby getting quite large. This means that the supply side (students) is not the issue; the problem lies with their perception that quality of management education provided here is not up to the mark.
The option for Vidarbha students therefore is to crack the IIM code or settle for second rung be schools and the final option to go to any of the schools in Pune and Mumbai.
The core of management education is 24 x 7 student managers to be available on campus- i.e. the courses need to be residential. This is not possible in the absence of full-time residential courses (exception-Institute of Management Technology-Nagpur)
Nagpur is a factory of human resource raw material. Traditionally, Nagpur has been a factory producing quality technical graduates to be supplied to industries in western Maharashtra, Gujarat and other parts of India.
The advantage Nagpur has its air, rail and road connectivity, preference of students from UP/Bihar/Chhattisgarh and Orissa to Nagpur over Pune because of distance. A large number of executives have residential base and visit Nagpur frequently which can be an additional academic resource for an educational institute.
Between Indore (IIM) and Hyderabad (International School of Business) and IIM (Raipur) there is no other management institute (except IMT – a private b-school which is ranked among top 20 among private b-schools). This vaccum will now be filled in by the establishment of IIM- Nagpur. The other advantages are the availability of land which is not an issue in Nagpur, strong alumni of IIM-A based in Nagpur, supplemented by specialists in the field of IT, production, and IT companies doing well in Nagpur
The biggest advantage of Nagpur is presence of public sector units such as WCL, MECL, MOIL, CICR and the presence of training institutes of international/national repute as NADT (National Academy of Direct Taxes), NADP (National Academy of Defence Production), on management development program front, IIM – Nagpur can do extremely well because entry to public sector is relatively easy.
Now VED looks forward to the setting up of other national-level higher educational institutes also like the National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education & Research (NIPER), National Institute of Technical Teachers’ Training & Research (NITTTR), National School of Design (NSD), National School of Drama (NSD), Indian School of Mines (ISM), National Dairy Research Institute (NDRI)and others.
