Amit Chandna and Nirvikar Yadav are due to graduate from the Australian Graduate School of Management’s (AGSM) MBA program in 2010. The pair both studied at Indian universities prior to moving on to multinational companies in IT consultancy and health care respectively.
Having done a Masters in Computer Applications at India's Institute of Management Technology, Chandna spent 18 months searching for the right MBA program before landing Sydney. “While I was aware of the good reputation and rank of the IIMs and ISB in India, none of them provide a global experience and thus they were not a part of my consideration set”, says the former consultant at Tata Group, Asia's largest IT consulting company.
Though standards are rising at India’s business schools – the MBA program at the Indian School of Business (ISB) was ranked 15th by the FT this year - they still don’t provide the global perspective on business problems and diverse student bodies of their peers.
For example at ISB about a fifth of faculty are from overseas and only four per cent of students. The number of international faculty at other schools in the top 15 ranges from about a third to 100 per cent at Switzerland’s IMD. The proportion of international students ranges from about a third at US schools and China’s CEIBS to over 90 per cent at elite high-ranked European schools.
“In a batch of 64 students we have representation of 31 countries,” says Chandna of AGSM. “It’s a unique opportunity to gain insight into different cultures and ways of doing business in different countries.”
Yadav claims that most Indian B-schools are “very India-centric”. The former Wipro GE Healthcare manager thinks that a global perspective is a major part of business education, and that it’s missing in his native country. “It's impossible for an Indian b-School to match the level of diversity that is present here at AGSM,” he notes.
Yadav goes on: “The class discussions… give you a complete picture of how to understand a case, which is such a wonderful learning environment.”
He also thinks that students in Sydney are not as intensely competitive as their Indian counterparts: “In Indian business schools, there have been instances of students committing suicide due to the high pressure from the school and peers.”
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