Private Unlimited

With their consistency and agility, these private B-schools are giving their public competitors a run for their money

- Karthik Ravindranath

The Boulevard Hotel, inaugurated in 1940, was the first privately owned hotel in Jamshedpur. During World War II, it was filled with pilots from the air force base close by. The Americans paid 01 and 4 annas per day for room and board. The British paid 14 annas as they had their own mess. This helped stabilise the hotel’s finances. The proprietors hoped that the post-war construction projects would see a boom in business for nearby Tata Steel, leading to full occupancy at the hotel. But things did not pan out that way; steelworks started picking up only in 1949. Around this time, a young Jesuit priest came from Maryland, US, to work in Jamshedpur.

Father Quinn Enright had been tasked, as all Jesuits are, with identifying and providing what the locality needed. Perhaps because of the proximity to the steelworks, Enright decided to club labour and management together. John D’Costa, owner of the Boulevard Hotel, was enthusiastic about this and offered him two rooms—No. 17 and No. 18. Thus, India’s first management school—Xavier Labour Relations Institute—started two years after independence, in a private hotel in a city built and run by a private company. It took a decade more for the Planning Commission to realise the importance of training managers, when it was proving difficult to find suitable personnel to manage the big public sector enterprises that were being set up in India. This led to the establishment of IIMs in Calcutta and Ahmedabad in 1961.

In THE WEEK-Hansa Research Best B-Schools Survey 2019, XLRI is ranked first among private institutes and fourth overall. It is also the only private school to be ranked among the top five in THE WEEK’s B-school survey every year since the first ranking in 2008 (see graphics on page 86). In the human resource development ministry’s national institutional ranking framework (NIRF), too, XLRI is the best private B-school in India.