NEW DELHI: Talent hunters from the big global names in business and finance, who regularly scout India’s top business schools, are suddenly finding themselves competing with local companies, ready to match the top dollar salaries.
On March 13, Gaurav Agarwal, a student at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) at Bangalore, found himself surrounded by television cameras after it was announced that the British investment banker, Barclays Capital, had offered him an annual salary of 193,000 US dollars. It was a record of sorts but one which lasted barely three weeks.
The Hyderabad-based Indian School of Business (ISB) stated on April 5 that one of its graduates had been offered a salary of 223,800 dollars by an Indian firm. Three other students from the same institution had received job offers each exceeding 200,000 dollars. Spokesman at the ISB refused to disclose the names of either the students or their potential employers to maintain confidentiality.
“What was especially surprising was the fact that the highest salary in US dollars was offered by an Indian technology company with international operations,” Ajit Rangnekar, deputy dean of the ISB, told IPS. “It is significant that Indian companies are today willing to pay global salaries to talented young graduates so as to be able to compete effectively in the world market — that’s the big message,” Rangnekar said.
For decades, the government bemoaned the loss of the cream of the country’s management and engineering talent, that graduate from fine state-run institutions funded with public money, to Western industry, thanks to a lack of suitable opportunities and the less-than-congenial working conditions at home. This has been especially true of the seven Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) set up by the government with the idea of providing the brains for the country’s industry which, however, stagnated under the protectionism and high taxes of a socialist economy, forcing the flight of talent.
Many of the ‘B-school’ graduates being offered high salaries already have work experience in developed countries. Agarwal, an engineering graduate from the IIT at Kanpur, had done a summer internship with Barclays before joining the IIM-Bangalore and had also worked in a network chip-design firm in California’s Silicon Valley.
Obtaining suitable employment has never posed problems for students studying in India’s best B-schools, including the six IIMs that were set up by the Indian government alongside the IITs from the early-1960s onwards. The high salaries currently being offered reflect the confidence global corporations repose in not just Indian managers but also in the quality of teaching and training imparted in the country’s state-run institutions.
Responsible for this has been India’s gradual transition from a controlled Socialist-style economy through a process of liberalisation begun in the early 1990s that not only provided new job opportunities in manufacturing and technology but also enhanced the reputations of the IITs and the IIMs, besides a handful of privately-run institutions.
This year, the outgoing students of the IIM-Bangalore have attracted the attention of the biggies in global investment banking such as Goldman Sachs, BNP Paribas, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, Deutsche Bank, ABN AMRO, UBS and J P Morgan besides Barclays Capital.
Manan Ahuja, 26, from the IIM at Ahmedabad told the Christian Science Monitor that the 185,000 dollars-a-year salary package offered him by Barclays was much more than what his father — a government bureaucrat in Delhi, India’s capital — had earned in his entire life.
During five days of recruitment at IIM last month, more than two jobs were offered to each of the institute’s 235 students, with salaries hiked as high as 100 per cent over the last year.
Bakul Dholakia, director, IIM Ahmedabad, said that multinational corporations are now looking beyond Harvard and Wharton towards India “for the world’s brightest business graduates”.
He added that one cannot sell a product merely by its brand image. Pointing out that 80 per cent of the 110 companies that visited his institution this year had come more than once, Dholakia said: “No company will visit us repeatedly if we are not intrinsically good.”
“The fact that IIM graduates get the best salaries is nothing new,” Prof Sushil Khanna, at the IIM at Kolkata , told IPS in an interview. “This phenomenon is attracting attention because among the criteria being used to rank B-schools is the starting salaries of graduates.”
The IIMs are known for raising the bar very high before admitting students. For instance, in 2005, for roughly 1,300 seats in the IIMs, there were as many as 158,000 applicants who had appeared for a common aptitude test.
In other words, less than one out of a hundred individuals who aspire to enter an IIM actually makes it.—Dawn/IPS News Service
