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Preeti Mehra

Customisation of curricula is finally taking shape in India as premier management institutes realise the importance of giving a desi touch to courses on offer.

It was in October 1999 that you heard of MBA curricula being customised to suit the needs of Indian students and corporate executives, for the first time. The course was being offered by Australia's Deakin University for the distant education management programme, launched in conjunction with the Association of Professional Engineers, Scientists and Managers, Australia (APESMA), and endorsed by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI).

The university obviously saw an enormous market for its MBA courses in India, and to make them even more relevant and popular, announced their customisation. In fact, the desi touch to the international management programme had been given by a faculty of management experts from premier institutions such as IIM, Ahmedabad and Kolkata, Faculty of Management Studies (FMS) of Delhi University, Bangalore's Indian Institute of Science, and Delhi's Indian Institute of Public Administration.

Key academicians had either redeveloped the curriculum of a particular unit or were serving as unit chairs in the faculty. For instance, the study guide on IT for managers had been developed locally and included several case studies of Indian companies such as Bajaj Auto, Amtrex Appliances etc. and how they have integrated IT planning in their companies.

However, though the customisation was added to achieve an edge over competitors, the distant education programme has dropped the customisation bit along the way. Through student feedback they discovered that students preferred to pursue the international curricula.

Deakins no longer offers the distance education course. However, APESMA still does. Along with La Trobe University, it offers a distance education management programme, which is self-paced and designed to provide working professionals with the opportunity to undertake formal management studies, but is no longer specially customised for the Indian student.

However, there are others who are using the customised method to gain in points and student numbers. The Asia-Pacific Institute of Management (AIM) is one that prides itself in practising constant innovation and customising business education for India. "Whereas the pedagogy abroad involves more of free-rolling discussions amongst the teacher and the students, the teacher in Indian business schools has a more important and value-added role to play by being both a part of the discussion team and the moderator as well. AIM has customised some courses by introducing case studies and projects based on Industrial and Rural Marketing in the Indian scenario," says Professor G. Ashesh of AIM.

He reels off the names of specific papers that encompass the Indian business scenario and provide the student a more holistic perspective. "Papers such as Legal Aspects of Business, Economic Environment and Policy, Marketing Research, Strategy Formulation and Implementation. It is further supplemented by cases on papers such as International Business and Negotiations and Cross-Cultural and Comparative Management. The teaching methodology accentuates the experiential learning by hands-on projects on Entrepreneurship and Innovation so that eventually the students have a lesser gestation period when they join any industry of their choice," he says.

In fact, the Indian School of Business (ISB) in Hyderabad also seems to be strategically placed in India so that the global industry gains fresh insights into the nuances of the `great Indian middle class market'. The ISB curricula includes the Wharton Global Consulting Practicum — "where a batch of ISB and Wharton students will play consultants to real-life firms facing real-life problems" and the New Business Development Project — "where a group of students will identify, evaluate, and research an idea and develop it into a business plan".

In other words, ISB would virtually be serving as a business studies laboratory and in future will provide its partners Wharton and Kellogg enough research material to number crunch and chew on.

The Indian School of Planning and Management (IIPM) has customised its management education programme in a different way, to make it as hands-on and relevant as possible. Says Arindam Chaudhuri, Dean, IIPM, "Customisation of management education is of most critical importance for business schools, but has to be moderated with respect to the final application space; that is, in what would students finally wish to apply their knowledge. At IIPM, with the imperative emphasis on national economic planning, management students are submerged in India-centric planning methodologies and strategies combined with analysis of global opportunities and threats while studying various subjects."

The institute provides examples of some India-centric learning initiatives that it has undertaken. The first is the exposure it provides to students by giving them the opportunity to work on live consulting assignments (and not simple summer projects or term papers) in Indian industries. "General Electric to ABB, Nestle to HLL, Citibank to Standard Chartered, various leading companies in India have employed IIPM's consulting solutions. IIPM students are involved in all such consulting projects across industries and across geographies. Thus, they get real-time exposures while working on live consulting projects," says IIPM's Professor A. Sandeep.

Some of these projects include the launch of Reliance Infocomm, media strategies for vehicles such as Bolero and Scorpio, handling Nike promotion in India, Amway's HR development strategies, American Express recruitment process mapping, strategising and implementing the launch of HLL's network marketing initiatives. "The most important factor is that students actually get to define, strategise and implement the future courses of action for various companies," he explains.

He emphasises that the institution also continuously tries to expose students to international management practices and learning, at the same time also ensuring that students appreciate such knowledge gain with respect to Indian dynamics. For example, the Global Opportunities & Threats Analysis Programme (GOTA). In the light of globalisation, students at IIPM have the option to undergo global study tours in selected countries in the Asian, Australian, European and American continents.

During the overseas study tour, students are taught the special GOTA paper with assistance from leading faculties and organisations across the globe that ensure that the learning is necessarily transliterated taking into account the Indian context and conditions. "The attempt is to make the students aware of how truly global economies work; and most importantly, to bring a re-engineered outlook conducive to entrepreneurial learning in the Indian context." Organisations that have supported such academic initiatives of IIPM in the past have included United Nations, ILO, World Bank, Nestle, Credit Suisse, Federation of Swiss Watch Industry, IMD Lausanne, INSEAD, Webster University, Sulzer and so on.

Dr D.K. Chaudhuri, Director of the institute, sums up the necessity for such customisation. He says, "Problems of development of the Indian private and the public sectors are to be studied and analysed carefully in the background of Indian national economic planning. If we don't customise learning to Indian conditions, Indian industries would not be able to translate the laudable goals of plans into physical realities, however sophisticated the planning models may be."

Hence, customisation of curricula may mean a different objective for each institution, but it sure does take the student further on a certain path, in the process making business education more relevant, global and yet customised to suit local needs.

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