Most of these boys and girls come from middle class background and those who make it to the IIMs are assured of the kind of annual financial rewards their parents would not have ever earned in their lifetime.
If the country has to excel in the services sector on the global scale, we should not produce one but hundreds and thousands of Gauravs who can go out and win the world.
They were promoted by the government and were depending on the Budgetary support for running their affairs. No doubt, they have established their names not only in India but also the world over. They have now become ambitious and want to go global in terms of opening their branches. We are talking of the Indian Institutes of Managements (IIMs) which attract the best of the breed of students, most of whom are engineering or economic graduates. The pass-outs from these B-schools, as they are called, have started hogging the headlines for astronomical salaries they are offered at the start of their career.
Crazy figures like Rs 85 lakh a year on a foreign assignment or Rs 35 lakh a year on a domestic offer get the Page one treatment firing ambitions of the middle class familities. Against a little over thousand odd seats in the IIMs, there are about 165,000 aspirants. Most of these boys and girls come from middle class background and those who make it to the IIMs are assured of the kind of annual financial rewards their parents would not have ever earned in their lifetime. But lakhs of the students who do not get into these have to settle for the private-run colleges which have sprung up all over the country. Mind you they charge a minimum of Rs two to three lakhs from these students who, at the end of their courses, consider themselves lucky if they find a job worth Rs 8,000 a month. They are in no way match for the cream passing out from the IIMs and you cannot blame them either. There is a world of difference between the faculty of the private B-schools and those teaching at IIM- Ahmedabad or Bangalore or Lucknow for that matter.
Besides, the level of industry interaction is far more superior giving confidence to the students to go and become the business leaders. Let'scome straight to the issue. There is no dearth of students wanting to take up education at the top institutions. We are not talking about third divisioners or even second divisioners. We are talking about those students who have scored 80 per cent plus marks both at the Plus two and graduation levels. But then, there are no seats for them at the IIMs which have become elitist. They are called elitist because a little over 1000 students passing out from these schools would not be enough to meet the industry requirement.
The result is astronomical salaries for a handful of the boys and girls while others land up in call centres. It is just a question of demand and supply. The supply has artificially been kept so low that it fetches the prohibitive price. Ironically, there is no move to expand the capacity of the IIMs within the country. IIM-Bangalore wanted to expand in Singapore and when the government objected to it, they remind us of their ?autonomy??. Government has now asked them to come out with their common vision plan rather than becoming further elitist by catering to the firangis abroad. If Gaurav Agarwal gets a starting salary of Rs 85 lakh nobody grudes it.
But the question remains why only Gaurav , why not others who are, maybe a notch below him, but do not get the opportunity to go to a good institute because of limited number of seats. If the country has to excel in the services sector on the global scale, we should not produce one but hundreds and thousands of Gauravs who can go out and win the world. But these restrictive policies would not let it happen.
When the then HRD Minister Murli Manohar Joshi tried to re-write the rules of the game so that those who remain deprived of good education can also benefit, there was a hue and cry from the vested interests who unfortunately manipulated the media in their favour. A similar treatment was meted out to the present HRD Minister Arjun Singh who is left with little energy to confront these interests who would like the elitist nature of the IIMs and the IITs to continue.
