UP AND RUNNING

India's young IIMs are steadily carving out their own path

- BY ABHINAV SINGH

With red buildings at the foothills of the Aravallis in Rajasthan, the campus of the Indian Institute of Management, Udaipur, offers a vibrant view. Its presence has also ensured that the City of Lakes is now buzzing with students from across the country. Set up in 2011, IIM Udaipur has become one of the most sought-after IIMs for research.

“The learnings of older IIMs were available to us,” said Prof Ashok Banerjee, the director. “There is no legacy or baggage. Innovation in an older IIM meets more resistance. For newer IIMs, the resistance to change is less. New IIMs can do many things more innovatively.”

Land was allotted to IIM Udaipur in 2014 and the campus was operational by 2017. However, it has not received government funding since 2018. “After the first five to six years, the government said you are on your own,” said Banerjee. “The corpus for new IIMs could not be built with grants. So we are building corpus through our own income. Any future expansion has to be financed through loans.”

IIM Udaipur's vaunted research capabilities are driven by specialised centres. “After joining I realised that the work environment at IIM Udaipur is as good as, if not better than, European universities,” said Prof Saurabh Gupta of the Centre for Development and Policy Management, who has taught in England and Germany.

In terms of per capita research output, the institute outperforms even IIM Ahmedabad and IIM Bangalore—it has 60 faculty members, compared with more than 120 each at the top two.