We Are At An Interesting Inflection Point In The Evolution Of India: Prof Rishikesha T Krishnan, IIM Bangalore
As the world adapts to the disruption of the COVID-19 crisis, business schools might become more relevant than ever. Fundamental change in almost everything from remote working to global supply chains brings with it, the opportunity to rethink conventional ways of working.
What the future B-Schools be like? What are the changes that COVID-19 has brought in into the B-Schools’ Directors thinking process and hence how the institute functions? Where will be the campuses two years from now? Will we need physical infrastructure or not? How are the various stakeholders – the students, the teachers and the recruiters dealing with this? To focus on all these issues, BW Education hosted, WednesdayWisdom - “The Future Business Schools- What It Will Be?" in association with BW Businessworld.
The panel consisted of power-packed speakers from reputed Business Schools, the IIMs - Dr Anju Seth, Director, IIM Calcutta; Prof Rishikesha T Krishnan, Director Designate & Currently Professor, IIM Bangalore; Prof Himanshu Rai, Director, IIM Indore; Prof Nagarajan Ramamoorthy, Director, IIM Amritsar; Dr Vinita S Sahay, Director, IIM Bodh Gaya; Prof Dheeraj P Sharma, Director, IIM Rohtak. The session was moderated by Dr Annurag Batra, Chairman & Editor-In-Chief, BW Businessworld & exchange4media Group.
“We are at a very interesting inflection point in the evolution of India and this offers unique opportunities for our management graduates. If you just look at the challenges in the economy, the whole Aatm Nirbhar Programme and several other initiatives which the government is contemplating, clearly the horizon for management education going forward is quite bright. So, while in the rest of the world even before COVID, there was a kind of slow down as far as MBA programmes are concerned and in fact programmes were closing in some geographies even before COVID and that trend has got accelerated now, in India, we don’t face any such threat right now,” underlined Prof Rishikesha T Krishnan, Director Designate & Currently Professor, IIM Bangalore.
Dr Anju Seth, Director, IIM Calcutta said, “The future Business Schools are going to remain in many ways the same but in many ways different as well. What is likely to remain the same? We think that the networks that our students form are so critical in their development and in their future careers as managers. Those networks will stay the same and perhaps become even stronger, going into the future with new technologies, what we see is that the capability to reach out to their alumni, to their peers, to their colleagues and friends is becoming actually easier.”
“There are two viewpoints from which I would like to catch the future of management education. In fact, not just the future of management education but the future of higher education. Firstly, we will have to reimagine management education itself. So far, we have been focussing on management education, more in terms of functionality. There were several things that we didn’t even look at, for example – our relationship with the universe. This COVID-19 pandemic is not the first one and this is not going to be the last one. Secondly, we will have to redefine the kind of social impact that we are making. We will have to relook at our role so far, as the nation-building is concerned. The Aatm Nirbhar part being spoken about, how can we contribute to this?”
