the 'game plan' to recruit B school graduates - Youth in india

due to inscreasing number of B school graduates, the companies are developing competitive mode to select the best, resulting another stressful environment for the students that they dream to avoid by choosing MBA (management) courses thinking that the path will be less competitive, in a country of billions.

here's an article :

Students graduating from business schools know the summer vacation that follows is anything but a holiday. It is placement season, when they must gear up to meet prospective employers. And companies visiting campuses are increasingly using competitions to recruit the best among them.
Take Mahindra & Mahindra, for instance. Since 2009, it has had a competition platform called 'War Room' which holds contests of job aspirants. These allow students with different specialisations to work on strategy solutions to real-life problems the group companies face.

"This is a very good way for us to source talent as we are able to gauge the candidates in an in-depth way," says Rajiv Dubey, HR Head at M&M. "It is not a substitute for other methods of campus recruitment but complements them."

Five of the many students who participated in last year's War Room are now part of the company's management training programme.

Vipul Manglik, 26, who pursued an MBA from Management Development Institute (MDI) Gurgaon, has joined a management training programme at Bharti Airtel and will be assigned a permanent role in January. Manglik was a runner-up at iCreate, a competition platform organised by Airtel.

"I was offered a per-placement interview with the company after my team won. This put me a big step ahead of my batchmates," he says.

Competing alongside more than 300 teams from India's top 15 B-schools, Manglik's three-member team worked on one of four case studies assigned by Airtel. In this case too, all four studies related to actual problems faced by the company. Manglik's team had to find a way to increase Airtel's 'Green SIM' service penetration in rural areas. Through this SMS and call service intended for farmers, registered subscribers get region-wise information on pesticides, crops and how to increase farmland production.


The project was extensive and required secondary research, as well as field visits to Haryana's Rewari district, about 60 km from the MDI campus. Manglik's team observed business transactions between farmers, vendors and middlemen at the local mandis and was able to draw connections between what they saw and heard and concepts they had read about. Their final proposal involved setting up a platform to bring vendors and farmers together.

"While the competition was launched in 2009, we started awarding students the pre-placement interview offers only from last year," says Krish Shankar, Executive Director, HR, Bharti Airtel. "We selected two students in this way." Manglik was one of them.

Many other companies have joined the fray, including PepsiCo India, whose platform - named after its global CEO, India-born Indra Nooyi - is called 'Become Indra's Advisors'. This is a new, trendy means companies have found to create a brand for themselves in colleges and hire quality talent, says MDI professor Kamal Kapil.

"While such platforms have been around for more than a decade, it is only now that this trend is catching on in recruitment," he adds.

So while companies use competitions to pick and implement new ideas proposed by the students and keep an eye on the potentials, students see them as a great opportunity to network with industry professionals, gain valuable insights and, of course, get job offers. It is a win-win situation for both.


News source : Business Today. © 2012. LMIL.

India: The next university superpower?

India has ambitious plans to increase graduate numbers in a way which would give it the size and status of an education superpower.
The figures are staggering. India's government speaks of increasing the proportion of young people going to university from 12% at present to 30% by 2025 - approaching the levels of many Western countries.

It wants to expand its university system to meet the aspirations of a growing middle class, to widen access, and become a "knowledge powerhouse".

It will mean increasing the country's student population from 12 million to over 30 million, and will put it on course to becoming one of the world's largest education systems.

"We will very likely be number two if not number one in terms of numbers," says Pawan Agarwal, a former civil servant and author of Indian Higher Education: Envisioning the Future.

With US enrolment stagnating and the UK cutting back on university places, "Indian graduates will become more visible globally, particularly in technical and engineering fields", Mr Agarwal predicts.

'Great leap forward'

KN Panikkar, vice chairman of the Kerala State Higher Education Council, describes India's higher education spending as undergoing a "great leap forward".

The amount of money in the central budget for higher education in the current five year plan (2010-2015) is nine times the amount of the previous five years.

But there is a steep hill to climb. India's National Knowledge Commission estimated the country needs 1,500 universities compared to around 370 now.

Hundreds of new institutions are being set up, including large new public universities in each state. The number of prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and Management (IIMs) are being expanded from seven to 15.

India's private university sector is also growing rapidly, particularly in professional education in information technology, engineering, medicine and management where there is huge demand from the burgeoning middle classes.

But that will not be enough. To bridge the gap the government last year tabled legislation to invite foreign universities to set up branch campuses. The Foreign Providers Bill is currently making its way through parliament.

'Fever pitch'

Last year there were reports of up to 50 foreign universities being interested in setting up in India. The hype reached fever pitch in November during the visit of US President Barack Obama and a large group of US university presidents.

UK Higher Education minister David Willetts and the largest-ever Canadian delegation were also in the country, enthusiastically talking of university partnerships.

Some foreign universities are already in place. The UK's Leeds Metropolitan University provides management degrees on a 36-acre campus in Bhopal in central India.

Lancaster University runs courses at the GD Goenka World Institute - a 69-acre site near Delhi. Both institutions opened in 2009 as joint ventures with Indian non-profit partners under existing laws.

Some bring faculty and staff from their home institutions, but even the most prestigious public institutions, including the IITs, are struggling to fill top faculty positions and teacher student ratios are deteriorating.

Foreign institutions able to lure staff with higher salaries will make the situation worse, detractors of the Foreign Providers Bill point out.

Mr Panikkar says foreign and private institutions are not the answer. "If only 1% of the population can afford the fees, then it will be very serious for the country in terms of equity."

Fair access

Access is an important issue for the government which came to power because the benefits of India's rapid economic growth were seen to have bypassed the country's poor.

Students in the chemistry department at the private Amity University in Noida While more than 95% of children now attend primary school, just 40% attend secondary school, according to the World Bank. That in itself will limit growth in university enrolment.

The World Bank has said India's economic success cannot be sustained without major investment in education, including higher education, with public spending on the sector still lagging behind countries like China and Brazil.

But the gold-rush mentality has dissipated. The Foreign Providers Bill is stuck in a parliament that has done little business since a telecommunications corruption scandal erupted last year.

"There has been some toning down of expectations of foreign universities," said Rahul Choudaha, associate director, World Education Services in New York and a close observer of the sector.

"The public university system in many countries is in crisis, facing serious budget cuts. They are not ready to invest money in partnerships."

Some "gold diggers" were dissuaded as the government made it clear for-profit companies would not be allowed to exploit India's thirst for higher education.

Unlike Singapore and China, the Indian government does not want to appear to favour foreign institutions by providing public money or large land grants.

Duke University, based in North Carolina in the US, has been interested in India for some time.

"We want to develop Duke as a globally-networked university. The best researchers are those connected globally," says Gregory Jones, Duke's vice president and vice provost for global strategy.

'Eastward shift'

But its Shanghai campus will be in operation first. "They [Shanghai] were willing to donate and build the first phase at their expense so it was a financially-viable proposition for us," said Mr Jones.

"It is not yet clear how we will develop our presence in India. It is a complicated reform bill."

An eastward shift in the geography of science and technology is a major draw as international companies set up research and development sites in India and China.

"We are tapping into the research potential of these Asian countries," says Professor Pradeep Khosla, dean of Carnegie Mellon University's College of Engineering.

The prestigious US institution has teamed up with India's Shiv Nadar Foundation to open an engineering college in the southern state of Tamil Nadu.

But these joint ventures are not fully-fledged overseas campuses. "Only a handful of overseas universities are thinking about that seriously," said Mr Agarwal. "But even if they go ahead it will not be enough. They will only increase capacity for hundreds of Indian students, not millions."

That means huge public spending on colleges outside the cities, says Mr Panikkar who has written extensively on social justice in higher education. He believes the enrolment targets are too ambitious given limited public resources and bottlenecks in staffing and infrastructure.

"What is achievable is adding perhaps 10 million students to existing capacity in the next five to seven years," he says.

That would still be a major achievement, but some way from making India an education superpower.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12597815

Young Indians Watch TV more than they read

India’s youthful population is constantly described as a potential “demographic dividend” for its government and also a goldmine for the businesses here to tap, so expect a slew of studies by government agencies and firms on their habits. Last week, India came out with the first national survey to find out what young Indians are reading and how that compares to how much time they spend watching TV or surfing the web.

Visitors at the Delhi Book Fair in Sept.2006. India’s youth and their reading habits became a subject of a survey in 2009, a report on which was released in New Delhi late last week.

Last year, India’s National Book Trust, a government body that publishes and promotes books, asked the National Council of Applied Economic Research to carry out a survey of the reading habits of young Indians, classified as those between age 13 and 35. The report was actually completed in February, but only “officially” released late last week.

According to the report, in 2009 the number of people between 13 and 35 in India was 459 million, or 38% of the country’s total population. Among them 333 million were able to read, 44% of them women. About 62% of India’s literate youth live in villages, which is roughly proportionate with the number of Indians as a whole who do.

Of these young people, 77% are interested in music and films, 72% in news and current affairs, 59% in religious and spiritual topics, 35% in science and technology and 34% in environmental pollution.

When it comes to the language they prefer for “leisure reading,” 33.4% are most comfortable with Hindi, 13.2% with Marathi, 7.7% with Bengali and only 5.3% prefer English.

Only about 10% of those who can read are college graduates.

Some of the findings were surprising to say the least. According to the report, “a literate youth spends on an average 98 minutes daily viewing TV” and another 61 minutes dialy listening to the radio. The report also said these youngsters spend 70 minutes surfing the Net, 44 minutes reading a magazine and 32 minutes with a newspaper. That would add up to an average of almost five hours a day consuming one form of media or another, which seems rather a lot. What about school and work?

The survey covered 432 villages and 200 towns in the country, according to a public advertisement on the report’s release in newspapers.

“It is the first formal research into the rich possibilities that lie ahead for the nation in marshalling the intellectual capacity of youth for national progress,” said Rajesh Shukla, a senior fellow at NCAER who wrote the report, at its release according to a statement from the National Book Trust.

Source: Wall Street Journal

Education and success stories @ Youth in India

Every year I report "dreams coming true through education" real life stories at INgene and this year also the saga continues.

Indian middle class spends 8.9% of their income in education and career development :


Shoeshine boy aces IIT entrance exam
Thu, May 27 05:47 PM

He helps his father, a cobbler, mend shoes in his spare time while his mother stitches rags to support the family, but financial hardships have not stopped Abhishek Kumar Bhartiya from coming out with flying colours in the IIT entrance exam.

Abhishek, who secured 154th rank in the SC category of IIT entrance test, now wants to propel his dreams by pursuing aerospace engineering at IIT-Kanpur here.

His father earns Rs 60-70 ( US$ 1.55, below poverty line) daily and mother stitches old clothings to earn money. But "this has never held them back from facilitating our education," Abhishek says, dedicating his success to his parents.

Abhishek, who also tries to pitch in by polishing shoes at his father's shop, has three young brothers and the family of six lives in a one room accommodation with no electricity.

"We have just one small room where six of us live and that too without electricity. So, he used to study under the lantern for five-six hours in the night," says his father Rajendra Prasad.

The family could not even think of providing coaching to Abhishek. "But by God's grace, a teacher of a coaching insitute helped him out," he says.

But even in the time of happiness, poverty haunts the family. "I am worried about the fees. From where can I manage the amount? This question is troubling my mind but even if I have to sell myself, I am ready for it," Prasad said.

With relatives flocking their house after hearing the news, the joyous father says he has not been able to open his shop since the IIT-JEE result came out yesterday.

"We are very happy. He is the first person in our family to be selected to the IITs," says his uncle Manoj Kumar.

Abhishek says he wants to support his siblings' education and help them to get into prestigious institutes

News source: http://in.news.yahoo.com/241/20100527/1262/twl-shoeshine-boy-aces-iit-entrance-exam.html

Kaustav SenGupta
INgene

Education & career are the prime focus among Indian youth

Over a million to appear in engineering entrance test
Sat, Apr 25 07:04 PM

New Delhi, April 25 (IANS) Over one million students will be appearing in the All India Engineering Entrance Exam (AIEEE) Sunday seeking admission into engineering, architecture and other allied courses in government-aided institutes across India.

The three-hour examination will be conducted at 1,460 centres across the country. Last year, around 820,000 students appeared in the exam.

The AIEEE scores determine admissions to various national-level institutes including the National Institutes of Technology, Indian Institutes of Information Technology, deemed universities and other government-funded institutions.

Like last year's exam, experts are expecting a change in the pattern of questions again.

Aashish Choudhury of the Aakash Institutes, a chain of private coaching centres, said: 'Students were surprised last year when the pattern of questions changed. Instead of 120 questions, there were 35 in each of the physics, chemistry and mathematics section. The number of reasoning and comprehension questions was also more. This year too a change in the pattern is expected.'

Shiva Kumar, head of research and development academics, Career Launcher, said he expected the number of questions to fall further.

'The number of questions may come down further - in the 90-105 range. Fewer questions imply that at least half the questions in the three sections will be fairly easy to attempt. So the students should attempt as many of those (as they can) and not get stuck at the remaining ones,' Kumar advised.

Many students feel that a pattern change is easy to deal with if you are alert and fast.

Ritia Jain, who wants to get into an architecture course, said she was well prepared. 'I have done many practice papers. My strategy is to first tackle the easy questions and then get cracking at the tougher ones.'

Indo Asian News Service

Source:http://in.news.yahoo.com/43/20090425/812/tnl-over-a-million-to-appear-in-engineer.html