How IIM's Struggle To Attract Quality Students And Faculty Effecting The Brand?

The new IIMs have come a long way since they first took flight a decade ago, but still struggle to attract quality students and faculty. How does this impact the brand?

- Pankti Mehta Kadakia

It’s as easy as A-B-C. Any management student in India can tell you that. For generations now, the hierarchy of the coveted Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) has been denoted by the simple strain of the alphabet. By value of prestige, the chain goes: IIM-Ahmedabad or IIM-A; IIM-Bangalore or IIM-B; and IIM-Calcutta or IIM-C. That sequence remains dominant even today, almost six decades after the first IIMs were established in Ahmedabad and Kolkata in 1961, and now when 20 IIMs stand ground.

This is part of the problem.

The IIMs can be categorised into three generations. The first set, referred to as the ‘older IIMs’, are IIM-A, IIM-C (established in 1961), IIM-B (1973), IIM-Lucknow (1984), IIM-Indore (1996) and IIM-Kozhikode (1997). The hierarchy remains largely sequential, in order of establishment.

Then comes the second generation, colloquially called the ‘new IIMs’. The previous government pushed for the expansion of quality management institutes, setting up seven new IIMs about a decade ago—these are at Shillong (which began its first academic session in 2008-09); Rohtak, Raipur, Ranchi, Tiruchirappalli or Trichy (functioning since 2010-11); and Udaipur and Kashipur (started from academic year 2011-12). All of these were until recently operating from makeshift campuses.

Even before this fledgling generation of IIMs could be fully functional, a third generation of IIMs was set in motion in 2015-16. The six ‘Baby IIMs’, as they are called, have been established at Amritsar (Punjab), Bodh Gaya (Bihar), Nagpur (Maharashtra), Sambalpur (Odisha), Sirmaur (Himachal Pradesh) and Vishakhapatnam (Andhra Pradesh). A seventh was later announced at Jammu, which started its academic sessions a year later.