41 Himanshu Soni - India a New Global Destination for Education

India : The New Overseas Destination

IntroductionToday, Indian IT Engineers are dominating the Global IT industry. The Indian Education System is credited for producing this new breed of highly successful professionals. Today, the global interest in the Indian Education System is increasing rapidly. India has become a popular Overseas Education Destination that offers a great value proposition: Globally recognized English-medium Education @ Affordable Costs

Globally Recognized

The success of the Indian Education Systems alumni indicates the global recognition of the Indian Education System

Engineers educated in India dominate the Silicon Valley: In 2001, more than 40% of the Venture Capital funded technology startup companies in Silicon Valley had at least one India-educated founder.

More than 15% of the teaching faculties in US Universities have their undergraduate degree from a University/Institute in India.

In the USA, India educated professionals constitute over 10% of the physicians, 21% of NASA employees, 18% of the Microsoft employees, 16% of the IBM employees and 17% of the Intel employees.

Over 100 of the Fortune 500 companies regularly recruit from Indian university campuses.

In Nov 2004, according to research published by OPEN DOORS program of iienetwork.org in the USA, India is the leading place of origin for international students in US Universities/Colleges.

#1 India (79,736, up 7%),#2 China (61,765, down 5%),#3 Korea (52,484, up 2%),#4 Japan (40,835, down 11%),#5 Canada (27,017, up 2%),#6 Taiwan (26,178, down 7%),#7 Mexico (13,329, up 4%),#8 Turkey (11,398, down 2%),#9 Thailand (8,937, down 11%), #10 Indonesia (8,880, down 15%).

English-medium Education

The best kept secret about India it is the 2nd largest English speaking country in the world. English is the de facto lingua franca of the government, education and business. In India, 72 million people are English literate. #EAEBED

Top English Speaking Countries

CountryEnglish Speaking People% of Total Population

USA280 millionNear 100%

India72 millionApprox 7.1%

UK61 millionNear 100%

Canada31 millionNear 100%

Australia20 millionNear 100%

NZ4 millionNear 100%

Population Data Source: Population Reference Bureau, Washington, DC

In India, English-medium education was started in the 19 th century - when India was the Crown Jewel of the British Colonial Empire. Over 150 years of English medium education and language diversity in various states of India have resulted in English being the only common language that unites modern India.

Today, many Indians have an English proficiency level that is at par with native English speakers. High English proficiency of Indian professionals going to the USA is one of the reasons for their astounding success in the USA.

American Call Centers in India

The new generations of English speakers in India identify themselves with the modern American culture and prefer the American accent. The growing number of American Call Centers in India that cater to North American customers is a testimony to Indias American English accent and proficiency.

YearEmployees in India

19998,600

200016,000

200133,500

200265,000

2003130,000

2004246,000

2005496,000*

*projections

Source: Nasscom/ McKinsey

Affordable Costs

The best part of the Indian Education System is its affordable price. There are numerous schools, colleges and universities scattered all over India. Most of these educational institutes offer globally recognized English-medium education at very competitive prices- what you would expect in a developing country.

Comparison of Annual Living Expenses

CountryAnnual Living Expenses ($)

US (Public Univ)$14,000- $16,000

US (Private Univ)$14,000- $16,000

Canada$9,000- $10,000

UK$15,000- $16,000

Australia$8,000- $12,000

NZ$8,000- $12,000

India$1,800- $4,200

Comparison of Annual Tuition Fees

CountryAnnual Tuition Fees ($)

HumanitiesScience & EnggMedicine

US (Public)$7,000-$10,000$7,000-$10,000$15,000-$25,000

US (Private)$16,000-$20,000$16,000-$40,000$20,000-$40,000

Canada$2,700-$9,400$2,300-$9,400$2,500- $10,000

UK$8,100- $16,200$8,100-$17,150$13,900-$27,200

Australia$5,400-$8,600$8,000-$10,500$15,000-$29,100

NZ$5,400-$8,600$8,000-$10,500$15,000-$28,100

India$2,150-$4,600$3,000-$8,500$8,000-$20,000

The total cost of one year of education in India can be as low as low as $3,950. The exact annual tuition fee varies among various Universities/Colleges in India. It depends upon the number of credits you select in an academic year.

The growing trend among many Asian students is instead of going to the USA for a 4-year Bachelors Degree, many students prefer to go to India for a 4 year Bachelors Degree and then go to the USA for a 2-year Masters Degree.

For Example:

Option 1: 4-year Bachelors degree education USA

Total cost of 4-year Bachelors degree education in USA: $84,000 or higher

Option 2: 4-year Bachelors Degree in India + 2-year Masters Degree in the USA

Cost of 4-year Bachelors degree education in India: $16,000 or higher+Cost of 2-year Masters degree in USA: $42,000 or higher=Total = $58,000 or higher

In the USA, the cost for a 2-year Masters degree program is usually lower due to the fact that more financial aid is available for Graduate students than for under-grad students.

Safe and Welcoming Environment

India has one of the lowest per-capita crime rates in the world. Traditional Indian values promote a safe and non-violent society. International students in India feel safe to travel on their own within India.

Most International students in India praise the warm hospitality they experience in India. International students are often invited to the homes of their Indian colleagues. Most International students in India easily form life long friendships with their Indian colleagues.

India s Rich Cultural Heritage

Studying in India offers a special experience for International students. Students learn about Indias rich cultural heritage and valued traditions.

Students explore the historical monuments and places of interest spread across the country.

Adventurous students get a chance to visit the Taj Mahal on a starry full moon night, go on a camel safari on the sand dunes in the deserts of Rajasthan or simply soak in the Sun on the warm white sand beaches of Goa in the winter months of Jan/ Feb.

For art lovers, India offers ancient performing art forms such as yoga, Indian dances like Bharatnatyam and Odissi. The musically inclined are drawn to the enchanting Indian music. The colorful Indian festivals like Diwali (festival of lights) and Holi (festival of colors) are a treat to the eyes and enjoyed by the international students.Namas Bhojani for The New York Times

Interns spend an average of three months at Infosys, where they live in a 500-room hotel complex.

Bypassing internship opportunities on Wall Street, just a subway ride away from their Greenwich Village campus, they went to India to spend the summer at an outsourcing company in Gurgaon, a suburb of New Delhi.

"The India opportunity grabbed me," said Mr. Maldonado, a Boston native whose family is from the Dominican Republic. "I wanted to get a global feel for investment banking and not just a Wall Street perspective."

He and Mr. Simonsen, both 27, are spending three months at Copal Partners, an outsourcing firm with 100 analysts. It produces merger and acquisition pitch books and provides equity and credit analysis and other research to global banks and consultant groups, including those on Wall Street.

Mr. Maldonado and Mr. Simonsen, of Riverside, Calif., are part of a virtual invasion of India by American students. Graduate students from top schools in the United States, most from master of business administration programs, are vying for internships at India's biggest private companies. For many, outsourcing companies are the destinations of choice.

India is not just a line on an American student's rsum, said Kiran Karnik, president of the outsourcing industry trade body, Nasscom, "but also culturally fulfilling." Many students travel while in India, giving them a view of the country and its long history, he said.

Nasscom is now trying to track the ever-increasing numbers of foreign interns. Many are in India to study globalization firsthand, Mr. Karnik said; that is often not possible in China because, unlike India, English is not widely spoken there.

Mr. Karnik said he had met more than a dozen interns from the Harvard Business School who were spending this summer in India. "I expect a bigger horde of students to arrive next year because the ones here said they had a great time and will go home to talk about it," he said.

Elsewhere, too, the trend is on the rise. Four students from Fuqua School of Business at Duke University are interning in India, compared with only one last year and none in 2003. Of this year's interns, three are at Infosys Technologies, an outsourcing company in Bangalore, and the fourth is in Chennai at GlobalGiving, an organization based in Bethesda, Md., that helps support social, economic and environmental projects around the world.

At Georgetown University, Stanley D. Nollen, a professor of international business at the Robert Emmett McDonough School of Business, said India was of growing interest to students.

"No longer is India thought of as a land of snake charmers and bride burnings," he said. "Now India means the world's best software services, and increasingly, pharmaceuticals and auto parts."

Professor Nollen directs the school's programs for M.B.A. students in India, which include "residencies" - academic courses that are centered on consulting projects for companies operating in India. A group of 49 students arrived this month and went to companies like Philips India Software and MindTree Consulting, both in Bangalore; the motorcycle-making unit of Eicher in Chennai; and the ICICI Bank in Mumbai.

India can be a jolt to a first-time American visitor. In Gurgaon, a small town despite its tall office complexes and shiny new malls, Mr. Maldonado and Mr. Simonsen share an apartment where the power fails several times a day. Temperatures are regularly above 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer.

The two men said they came prepared to find inadequate infrastructure, but were not prepared for the daily frustrations of Gurgaon. There is no mass transportation system, and shopping, even for something as basic as an umbrella, can take hours. They rumble to work in an auto rickshaw - a motorized three-wheeler that seats two and is a ubiquitous form of transport in Indian cities.

But the sophistication of the work being done in Copal's Gurgaon office contrasts with the chaotic city outside. Mr. Simonsen said he was amazed. "I came expecting to see number-crunching and spreadsheet type of work; I didn't expect American banks to farm out intricate analytics," he said. The two students are working on a project that analyzes investment opportunities for clients across 23 countries.

Infosys Technologies, the country's second-largest outsourcing firm after Tata Consultancy Services, discovered how popular India had become as an internship destination for Americans when the company began recruiting: for the 40 intern spots at its Bangalore headquarters, the company received 9,000 applications. Only those with a cumulative grade-point average of 3.6 or more made it to a short list, and then they were put through two rounds of interviews.

The final 40, who cut a wide academic swathe from engineering schools like M.I.T. and Carnegie Mellon to business schools like Stanford, Wharton and Kellogg, have since arrived on campus for average stays of three months. The interns work in areas from marketing to technology. They live in a 500-room hotel complex on Infosys's expansive campus in the suburbs of Bangalore, exchanging coupons for meals at the food court and riding the company bus downtown to decompress at the many pubs and bars.

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Forum: The Economy

Among the Infosys interns is Caton Burwell, 28, from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. "India has come to symbolize globalization and I wanted to participate in the workings of the global economy," he said. "Besides, it would look great on my rsum."

Mr. Burwell said that, since arriving in India, he had developed a better grasp of the workings of the global economy and the logic behind the choices companies and countries make. "Being here is a powerful experience; it is impossible not to think differently," he said.

Also, his attitude toward outsourcing has changed since meeting Indian employees, who he said work very hard and care a great deal about the quality of their work. "To come here, meet these people, and to return home and turn your back on outsourcing is hard," he said.

Jeffrey Anders, 29, from the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T., is similarly stirred. Mr. Anders is halfway through his internship at the business process outsourcing division of Hewlett-Packard India in Bangalore.

"I can't help but feel that I am witnessing the creation of a new global economic order, a new reality that most people back home don't realize is coming," said Mr. Anders.

After a meeting with the recruiting head of Hewlett-Packard India's back-office unit at a conference at M.I.T., Mr. Anders came to India to help build a group of Indian economists and statisticians to perform complex analytics and predictive modeling for Western multinationals. "These highly educated and qualified people are not stopping at call centers and back-office work," he said. "They are getting ready to compete for every job."

Meanwhile, Indian companies are looking at summer internships as a way of building a diverse work culture.

"Bringing investment bankers here provides our Indian team a perspective and context of Wall Street," said Joel Perlman, co-founder of Copal Partners, a company based in London that has four employees each in New York and London and another 100 or so in India.

Other companies, and even the schools themselves, are looking at internships as a step toward attracting bright young Americans to work in India. Infosys, for instance, hired Joshua Bornstein, a former intern from Claremont McKenna College in California, nearly two years ago as its first American employee based in India.

"In this increasingly global economy, we would expect to see India become an even greater source of employment for our students," Sheryle Dirks, director of the Career Management Center at Fuqua, said.

Mr. Anders, from the Sloan school, works in a new Hewlett-Packard building, where he sometimes works out at the gym in the basement and eats at the cafeteria on the terrace. The employees work in open cubicles, similar to those in offices anywhere in the West. His team consists of four Indians, all with M.B.A.'s like him, and they operate globally, collaborating with teams in California and elsewhere.

Interns like Mr. Anders are getting a close view of social changes that are happening in India. Outsourcing has created thousands of better-paying jobs and spawned communities of young people who can afford cars, apartments and iPods.

"I thought the stipend was the down side," said Mr. Anders, "but coming here is a priceless experience."American businesses are increasingly moving their research and development operations to India and China. Debates rage in the United States about whether this will lead to greater prosperity or threaten this will lead to greater prosperity or threaten the country's global economic leadership. There are few facts

in the debate, yet business and political leaders appear to be reaching consensus on how to respond to the rise of India and China: have more American children study math and science, and graduate more engineers and scientists.

This remedy's most common justification is the supposed statistic that China and India between them graduate twelve times the numbers of engineers the United States does. Business executives such as Microsoft chairman Bill Gates say that they have no choice but to move their research and development operations abroad because a deficient US education system has resulted in a severe shortfall of engineers.

The Global Engineering and Entrepreneurship project team at Duke University has been researching this topic. We found that the graduation statistics in common use were misleading, as they were based on faulty comparisons. Our interviews with the executives of technology and engineering companies engaged in outsourcing research and development (R&D) to India and China revealed that their primary motivation in moving operations abroad was not a shortage of engineers but rather lower cost and the proximity of growth markets. Furthermore, we found that there were serious issues with the quality of engineering education in China and India.

Yet India is racing ahead to become a global hub for advanced R&D in several industries. In trying to understand how India is achieving this feat, we learned that the India private sector has found a way to overcome deficiencies in its education system through innovative programs of workforce training and development. These have transformed workers with a weak educational foundation into R&D specialists. In response, then, the United States needs learn from India and upgrade its workforce.

Engineering education

Various articles in the popular media, speeches by policy makers, and reports to Congress have stated that the US graduates roughly 70,000 engineers annually, while China graduates 600,000 and are India 350,000. Even the National Academies and the US Department of Education have cited these numbers.

But no one has compared apples with apples. In China, the word "engineer" does not translate well into different dialects and has no standard definition. An "engineer could be a motor mechanic or a technician. Chinese graduation numbers included all degrees related to information technology and to specialized fields such as shipbuilding. They also included two-and three-year degrees, making them equivalent to US associate degrees. Nearly half of China's reported engineering degrees fell into this category. The Indian definition of "engineer" was equivalent to the US one, but included information-technology and computer-science degrees. When we counted on a more consistent basis, we found that in 2004, the United States and India each graduated approximately 140,000 engineers, and China graduated 360,000. Chinese graduation rates have, however, been increasing dramatically since 1999.

We found a similar trend in Masters and PhD degrees. In 2005, China graduated 63,514 Masters and 9427 PhDs in engineering, exceeding corresponding US numbers: 53,549 and 7,720, respectively. India's graduation numbers were unimpressive: 18,439 Masters and fewer than 1,000 PhDs in engineering. In fact, India wasn't graduating enough PhDs to meet the growing staff requirements of its universities. However, China's increasing numbers came at the cost of quality: enrollments are increasing at all but the top universities without corresponding increases in faculty and infrastructure. The growth in India's graduation rates was coming largely from private educational institutions, the quality of which varied significantly: some provided good-quality education while the majority, did not.

Sending R&D abroad

Our interviews with 78 senior executives of US corporations involved in outsourcing engineering work revealed that India and China were their top destinations for R&D work, with Mexico in third place. The data these companies provided--on time to fill open positions, signup bonuses, and acceptance rates of job offers for engineering--showed no indication of a tightening job market. In other words, they were not experiencing shortages of engineers in the United States. The reasons they named for going offshore concerned salary and personnel savings, overhead-cost savings, 24x7 continuous-development cycles, access to new markets, and proximity to growing markets.

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These companies reported that American engineers produced work of better or equal quality and were at least as productive as their Indian and Chinese counterparts. Moreover, American engineers had advantages in education, cultural understanding, communications, and their understanding of markets. But Indian and Chinese engineers worked harder and cost significantly less.

When asked about current work being assigned overseas, nearly half of the companies we interview said they would hire engineers regardless of education level and would train them. Bachelor's degrees in engineering weren't, mandatory prerequisites. The vast majority of companies stated their intent to continue to outsource--and their expectation to outsource higher-level research and development to those countries. They indicated that for these advanced R&D jobs, they preferred Masters and PhD degree holders.

It is evident that though India may have enjoyed advantages in lower-end IT outsourcing, it was ill-equipped to benefit from the next wave of globalization, in which higher-end R&D and innovation would increasingly go offshore. It appeared that the country best positioned to become a global hub for R&D was China.

Next Wave of Globalization

Recent interviews with executives of multinational companies in China and India as well as India native firms reveal that despite its low rates of postgraduate science and engineering graduation, India is rapidly becoming a global hub for R&D, with a momentum and scale similar to those it accomplished in IT services.

In the aerospace industry, Indian companies are designing the interiors of luxury jets, in-flight entertainment systems, collision-control and navigation-control systems, fuel-inverting controls, and other key components of jetliners for American and European corporations. In pharmaceuticals, Indian scientists are discovering drugs and performing clinical research for nearly all of the largest multinational drug companies. In the automotive industry, Indian engineers are helping to design bodies, dashboards, and power trains for Detroit vehicle manufactures--an soon may develop entirely outsource passenger cars. In telecom and computer networking, Indian are developing next-generation solutions for intelligent cities. They are also developing innovative solutions for the Indian marketplace, such as the $2,500 car produced by Tata.

China is already the world's biggest exporter of computers, telecom equipment, and other high-tech electronics. Multinationals and government-backed companies are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into next-generation plants to turn China into an export power in semiconductors, passenger cars, and specialty chemicals. China is lavishly subsidizing state-of-the-art labs in biochemistry, nanotech materials, computing, and aerospace technologies.

Despite its advantages in engineering-graduation rates, massive investments in infrastructure, and massive economic subsidies, China does not in fact appear to be moving at the same pace as India in R&D outsourcing. Foreign multinationals were driving and overwhelming proportion of R&D and innovation in China and that most of this R&D is targeted at developing products for the local Chinese market. There are some exceptions, but Chinese industry appears to be excelling in imitation rather than in innovation.

The 64 Million Dollar Question

If engineering education is so critical to global competitiveness, how is India succeeding? To answer this, we met with the CEOs, human-resource directors, R&D leaders, managers, and employees, and visited the R&D and training facilities of 24 leading companies in India. These were in rapidly growing emerging sectors, including IT services, business-process outsourcing, semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, financial services, retail, hospitality, and education--all of which have managed to grow and innovate despite skills gaps and talent shortages.

How the Disciple Became the Guru

During the 1970s and 1980s, the Japanese achieved major advances in manufacturing management, which led to their rise as an economic power. The Japanese economic miracle and the country's new manufacturing skills and methods surprised western firms; but the Japanese had done this by studying, adopting, and eventually perfecting the best practices of western companies. The Duke team believes that India is achieving similar feats in workforce development: India has learned and perfected the best practices of leading companies that have been outsourcing their computer systems and call centers.

Faced with severe talent shortages, escalating salaries, and a lagging education system, Indian industry has had to adapt and has built innovative and comprehensive approaches to workforce training and management. The initial focus was on training new recruits and filling entry-level skill gaps. Now, these companies are investing in constantly improving the skills and management abilities of their workers and in providing incentives for them to stay and grow with the company. There is also widespread collaboration between industry players and academic institutions to accelerate the growth of needed talent pools.

We identified seven key areas in which Indian companies have developed innovative practices: employee recruitment, new employee training, continuing employee development, managerial training and development performance management and appraisal, workforce retention, and education upgrades.

Though US and European corporations have excelled in many of these functions for decades, the Indians have developed a few innovative practices, including the way these programs are integrated into day-to-day operations and into systems of career advancement and reward; the application of technology to managing and integrating each of these processes; and the executive-level decision making that is performed based on these processes. Just as enterprise resource-planning systems are used to manage manufacturing and distribution operations in leading firms the Indian systems help oversee the workforce management and development process.

Searching Far and Wide for Talent

India's top five IT companies alone hired nearly 120,000 new employees in 2007. IBM India and Accenture India hired nearly 14,000 each in the same period. This doesn't include the rest of India's sizeable technology industry. Considering that the country now graduates only about 200,000 in engineering, computer science, and information technology and NASSCOM, Indian technology industry trade group estimates that only half of these graduates receive education of sufficient quality to be employable. It is clear that the ostensible shortage of skilled workers is being filled by other sources.

The Indian companies we studied have become innovative not only in how they recruit but also in whom they recruit and where they look for talent. Most of them have developed a recruitment philosophy to hire for overall skill and aptitude rather than specialized domain and technical skills. They rely on training and development to bridge skill gaps. Instead of hiring only from top engineering universities technology companies recruit from second-and third-tier colleges all across the country and also in arts and science schools. Similarly, companies in the banking and hospitality industries hire from call-centers and the information technology sector. Diversity programs are also being implemented, both out of necessity and social purpose. Women and older workers in particular are being targeted by technology companies and call centers, which are also reaching out to rural and disadvantaged communities.

New Recruit Boot Camps

Companies in India have no choice but to assume that new recruits will have to be trained practically from scratch. They invest substantial time, money, and effort in the training function. Most large companies have built dedicated learning centers that house various training and development programs. The larger companies employ hundreds of training staff.

In the technology sector, new-recruit training programs typically span two to four months. In other industries program range from two to four weeks. The training curricula are generally highly sophisticated and teach not only the required technical skills but also the basics of topics like industry operations, customer management, communications, and team building. Formal induction training is typically followed by on-the-job training programs in which employees are assigned specific tasks under the supervision of trainers and managers.

Investing in Their Employees

Faced with fierce competition for talent, rising wages, and pressure from a currency gaining significant value, Indian companies have had to invest in making their employees more productive and rapidly moving them up the skill and management ladder. This has the effect of increasing billing rates and productivity of employees, and lessening attrition because of the rapid career advancement that employees can achieve.

Employees are typically required to participate in a wide range of training and certification programs, some developed in house and some delivered by external domestic and foreign training vendors. Training programs include not only technical and domain training but also a wide range of soft skills and management skills, including training in six-sigma/quality processes; communication; and cultural, behavioral, foreign-language, and personal-effectiveness skills. In addition to online courses, many companies have instituted programs of mentorship by senior executives; peer learning and knowledge sharing; and job-rotation programs. Career advancement and salary increases are usually tied to the completion of such training.

Employers have also invested significantly to train and mentor future leaders from within the firm. The average age of first-line managers in the Indian companies we studied is below thirty. Managers are typically grown through fast-track programs that provide management training and mentorship to high-performing employees. Preference is usually given to internal staff to fill a management opening before outside recruitment is considered. Performance-management systems usually play an important role in identifying high performers, creating an inventory of existing skills and strengths, and identifying skill gaps. They are used as a basis for career development through training, on-the-job experience, and coaching and mentoring.

All of the Indian companies we studied have implemented sophisticated performance-management and appraisal systems to create greater transparency and fairness in evaluation and rewards. Mechanisms such as 360-degree reviews and balanced-scorecard reviews are widely used. Managers are evaluated on a variety of non-financial measures, including employee satisfaction, attrition rates, and mentoring.

Performance management has been fully integrated with training and development at most companies, using periodic reviews to identify training needs, provide feedback and coaching, and facilitate employees' goal setting and career planning. Feedback sessions typically follow performance evaluations, and goal-setting processes are used widely as opportunities to communicate with employees; assess their interests, needs, and aspirations; plan their careers; and match their skills and aspirations with company and project needs.

Most companies have been able to achieve dramatic reductions in employee turnover by carefully analyzing recruitment, performance, and attrition data to identify patterns and predictor of attrition. Along those lines, corporate communications and employee engagement in the company and its programs are always a priority, and company executives are usually measured on their retention rates. All of this has led to constant refinements in all facets of human-resource practices.

Furthermore, Indian companies appear to have a high level of interaction with the private colleges and universities that supply them with talent. This involves working with these institutions to develop customized degree programs, train the educators, create new curricula, and negotiate deals to hire graduates in bulk--without job interviews.

Conclusion

Globalization poses many new challenges to US competitiveness and the current remedies do not cure the right disease. We are not going to be able to compete with India and China by matching their numbers in engineering graduation or by erecting trade or immigration barriers.

Education is amongst the most important investments a nation can make in its future, with math and science as particularly important subjects. But if we focus only on teaching more math and science to children who are presently in grades K-12, we will have lost the global race by the time they graduate from college, 10 to 15 years from now. Moreover, we need to compete on our strengths, which include innovation, entrepreneurship and the ability to learn and adapt. The Indian experience highlights what can be achieved by investing in upgrading the skills of the workforce. If workforce training can take the output of an education system as weak as India's and turn its graduates into world-class engineers and scientists, imagine what could be done with a worker base that has received among the best education in the world as is the case in the United States.

US companies have long played the guru, developing and disseminating many widely adopted management and workforce practices. The time has come for the guru to learn from one of its disciples: India.

When Americans think of the Indian technology sector, they still perceive a nation of call center workers and low-level computer programmers administering databases and updating websites. But while the West was sleeping, Indian IT morphed into a giant R&D machine. Indian companies that started out doing call center and low-level IT work have climbed the value chain to become outsourced providers of critical R&D in sophisticated areas such as semiconductor design, aerospace, automotive, network equipment and medical devices.

This is happening as multi-nationals set up their own R&D operations in India and partner with local shops. Both the Palm Pre smart phone and the Amazon Kindle, two of the hottest consumer electronics devices on the market, have key components designed in India. Intel designed its six-core Xeon processor in India. IBM has over 100,000 employees in India. A large number of these are building Big Blues most sophisticated software products. Cisco is developing cutting edge networking technologies for futuristic intelligent cities in Bangalore. Adobe, Cadence, Oracle, Microsoft and most of the large software companies are developing mainstream products in India.

Equally important are the arrival of Indian multi-nationals who are tackling global markets, such as Tata with its dirt cheap Nano car that the company is now positioning for a European market entry and Reva, which recently announced it was planning to build an electric car factory in New York state to address the U.S. market for electric vehicles.

What has been missing to date in India, however, is early stage venture activity and the type of grass-roots entrepreneurism that is the hallmark of American capitalism and Silicon Valley. In that respect China is way ahead of India with many startups taking advantage of huge government incentives and reeling in talented native Chinese returnees to serve as CEOs and CTOs. Note that Kaifu Lee, formerly Googles top guy in China, was able to launch a $100 million startup incubator focusing entirely on the mobile sector and he was flooded with business plans within days of opening his doors in the Middle Kingdom.

On my recent trip to India I started to see new signs of life in tech entrepreneurship. Many of the startups that Sarah Lacy and I met were really smart and hungry. Some were even doing things better than their Silicon Valley counterparts. Not all of these startups are developing breakthrough technologies but many of them are solving problems that U.S. companies have thus far failed to solve and doing it with fewer resources.

One of the most interesting companies I met is in the mundane business of developing offset printer ink. Their ink is made from vegetable oil and is entirely bio-degradable. The offset printing industry consumes 1 million tons of petroleum products and emits 500,000 tons of volatile organic compounds every year. An IIT-Delhi incubated startup called EnNatura developed a printing ink which emits no volatile compounds and is washable. And the overall cost of their solution will be significantly less than all present compounds when produced at scale. I can see a company like this growing into a billion dollar global business.

Another interesting company was LiveMedia. This is an out-of-home advertising company that has 4,500 screens in 2,200 destinations with a total reach of 50 million people. Of course, you can find exactly these sorts of TV screens in thousands of places across the U.S. Unfortunately, it has been very hard to make real money selling advertising on these networks. LiveMedia appears to have cracked that by creating specialized content that is more engaging and interactive than a box droning CNN or the Disney Channel. LiveMedia content includes games, quizzes, horoscopes, a few short animations, and other content that is both cheap to produce and easy to play along with or understand. LiveMedia has also perfected context-relevant advertising spots keyed to the crowds at the screen location.

LiveMedia is in the process of building out a partnership with Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs India that would give the network even more interactive capabilities. Bell Labs has developed a content management and routing system, dubbed Mango, that makes it much easier and efficient to deliver high-bandwidth, high-quality video and interactive content over existing networks. In the developing world, everyone wants a TiVO-like capability to share, store and manage content. But existing GPRS or EDGE-based cell networks are not up to snuff. And the broadband infrastructure still lags behind that of the most developed telecom networks in places like Japan, Korea and Scandanavia. A product like Mango is tailor-made for VC investment to get it out of the lab and into a spin-off company.

This is partly why so many U.S. venture capital shops have opened up branches in India. In fact, the two lead investors in LiveMedia are both U.S. venture capitalists including the respected Valley firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. But India lags in home-grown venture capital activity. As I have previously discussed, VCs follow the innovation. So the lack of native VC in India is notable in that it implies a critical mass of activity remains lacking, as well.

For example, in the first nine months of 2008, total early stage VC investments in India totaled $678 million, according to the Global India Venture Capital Association. In the U.S. over that same period early stage investments tallied $5.2 billion according to the U.S. National Venture Capital Association and that number is not entirely reflective of the real situation. The economic downturn hit the U.S. much harder than the Subcontinent and VC activity in the U.S. fell faster and harder. Regardless, a 10-fold difference between early stage venture activity clearly illustrates the capital is not there yet.

So when will there be enough innovative startups to support an explosion in venture capital? Id argue, sooner than you realize. During my week in India I spoke to close to 100 startups. A few of them had products or prototypes that would easily compete in Silicon Valley. Some of the leading lights of the legacy Indian IT giants are also moving quickly into VC. Infosys founder Narayan Murthy recently sold millions of dollars of shares in the company in order to launch a venture capital fund targeting investments in India.

The dynamics of entrepreneurship are the same in India as in America. Company founders usually come from the ranks of experienced business executives and are middle-aged. They get tired of working for others and want to make an impact and build wealth before they get too old. Given that there are now hundreds of thousands of R&D workers in India who are gaining valuable experience and are getting old, it is simply a matter of time before they begin to hatch their entrepreneurial plans. After all, their colleagues who migrated to the U.S. now start nearly one in six of Silicon Valleys tech firms.

Ill bet that in 5 years, if you stacked up a TechCrunch 50 of Indian start ups versus a comparable number of U.S. startups, it would be a pretty even match. Thats pretty amazing considering the relatively short length of time that the Indian startup scene has existed. And its a good lesson for America that the barriers to starting a company are lower than ever beforeand some ambitious engineer in India will eat your lunch if you dont get your prototype built and perfected ASAP.

For the last two years, its been a ritual for me to lock myself in a room for a week-end and read through the vast output of our faculty during the year

The 45th annual convocation of the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta (IIM-C) was held on the IIM-C campus at Joka on 3 April. The leading social activist and Ramon Magsyssay Award winner, Dr. Sandeep Pandey was the Chief Guest.

The 45th annual convocation of the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta (IIM-C) was held on the IIM-C campus at Joka on 3 April. The leading social activist and Ramon Magsaysay Award winner, Dr. Sandeep Pandey was the Chief Guest. Mr. Ajit Balakrishnan, CEO Rediff.com and the Chairman of IIMC Board of Governors presided over the ceremony.One of the key highlights of the ceremony was the speech by Mr. Balakrishnan. Mr. Balakrishnan himself is an alumnus of IIM Calcutta. We bring to you the complete speech. The topic of his speech was How IIM Calcutta Fared in Thought Leadership in 2009-10:For the last two years, its been a ritual for me to lock myself in a room for a week-end and read through the vast output of our faculty during the year. I get immense pleasure from this and in sharing with you today what I discovered I hope you will get a similar pleasure. The scale and width of the issues that our faculty have tackled is immense.For example, why do some alliances between Indian and international firms succeed and others fail? Prof BN Srivastava, of our Behavioral Sciences group, in a paper presented at the Academy of Management meeting in Chicago in August 2009, titled Positive Organizational Scholarship: A Cross-Cultural Perspective from Five Nations used the Positive Organizational Scholarship approach to study this issue and concluded that success is based on the quality of the connection. The quality of connection, in turn, depends on the emotional capacity to withstand both negative and positive experiences, resilience or capacity of the person to bend and withstand strain and to function in a variety of circumstances, and the relationships generativity and openness to new ideas and influences and the ability to deflect the pressures that shut the generative processes.We have of late observed the phenomenon of foreigners being hired for top management positions in Indian firms. Prof Rajiv Kumar of our Behavioral Sciences group studied the circumstances under which Indian companies hired such foreign talent and developed twelve propositions about this phenomenon. The desire to learn superior execution skills from these foreign nurtured talent, getting their help in managing overseas subsidiaries particularly in dealing with the external environment are two examples of these propositions. He also notes that the Indian companies who hired such managers are ones that have global ambitions in growth and technical excellence. His paper, Foreign Nurtured Talent in Indian Business Houses was accepted for the 10th International Human Resource Management Conference held at Santa Fe, New Mexico in June, 2009.We have seen the film industries in Hollywood or Bollywood where In independent business elements like studios, producers, directors, actors, technical personnel create a temporary network structure, which is project-based and inter-organizational in a system of recurrent ties among the various major participants who usually work under short-term contracts for single films. Economists have been baffled why they continue this so-called network organization structure even though it has been demonstrated that the transaction costs of such a structure are far higher than a hierarchically or purely market oriented structure. Since networked structures are increasingly evident across many industries, Professor Amit Jyoti Sen of Behavioural Sciences Group with a doctoral candidate, Apalak Khatua, proposed a framework `for understanding the circumstances under which such network structures emerge and their paper, Inside the Interorganisational Network, accepted for Association of Heterodox Economics Conference at Kingston University, Kingston-on Thames, UK, July, 2009.Outsourcing is what has driven Indias emergence as a global economic giant, yet little organization theory has developed to understand the many different organization forms these outsourcing firms take. In a study of sixty such firms, Professor Leena Chatterjee of Behavioural Sciences Group and Kirti Sharda, a doctoral candidate at that time, proposed five dominant types: Clear Eyed Strategists, Adapting Professionals, Focalizing Artisans, Conservative Controllers and Overambitious Associates. Their paper Configurations of Outsourcing Firms and Performance: Exploring Organizational Gestalts was presented at the 2009 Academy of Management Meeting held in Chicago during August, 2009.Businesses have, since the 1990s gained great benefit from the Business Process Re-engineering movement. Re-engineering involves a re-configuartion of core processes that set of interrelated activities, decisions, information, and material flows, which together determine the competitive success of the company. Is it possible to apply such a tool to governmental processes where what is core and what is not is often under dispute, the concept of value and value-adding process are difficult to measure. Professor Priya Seetharaman of our MIS Group and Prof Raghabendra Chattopadhyay of the Public Policy Group, based on their study of West Bengal Panchayats, propose a system of process channeling in their paper Process Reengineering in Government Institutions: Walking A Tightrope, presented at the 5th Annual International Conference on Public Administration, 2009 held at Chengdu, China during October, 2009. This , incidentally is a great example of researchers from two different groups, MIS and Public Policy, collaborating on a common research project.Algorithm-based recommendation systems are all the rage nowadays be it on Social Networking sites where you are recommended people you may like or in eCommerce sites where products are suggested for you. These face a continuous challenge in improving the quality of their recommendation. A paper entitled by Professor Ambuj Mahanti of Management Information Systems Group has proposed such an improvement in his paper , Improving Prediction accuracy in Trust-aware Recommender Systems, was presented at the 43rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences in Kauai, USA in January, 2010.In another paper, also in the broad area of machine learning, Professor Uttam Kumar Sarkar of MIS Group, and his associates used mathematical techniques to locate interesting patterns in the reporting of adverse effects of pharmaceutical products using the US FDA data and presented their findings at the International Society for Clinical Biostatistics conference at Prague, Czech Republic in August, 2009.Prof Debasis Saha of the MIS Group devised a new protocol to improve the efficiency of Wave Division Multiplexed Optical Networks, and the paper describing this work titled, An Intelligent Destination Initiated Reservation Protocol for Wavelength Management in WDM Optical Networks was presented at the 12th International Conference on Advanced Communication Technology held Republic of Korea, in February, 2010.Prof Debasis Saha and his collaborators presented a second paper, this one describing a new technique for improving the quality of service when a local area wireless network and a 3G network operate together presented their paper, An Improved WLAN-first Access Scheme for UMTS/WLAN Interworking System, at the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland in March 2010.Profs Subir Bhattacharya, Rahul Roy and others from the MIS group used a Systems Dynamic modeling to evaluate the future of Software-as-Service as a business model and presented their paper Quo Vadis, SAS, at the International Conference of Information Management at Chengdu, China, April, 2010.Prof Subir Bhattacharya and his co-worker devised a solution for a specific type of financial portfolio selction and presented a paper on this at the Conference on Automation Science and Engineering, Bangalore August, 2009. This paper is an early example where people from the MIS faculty used the facilities at our new Financial Lab and I hope we will see many more such cross-functional research endeavours.Prof Anup Sen and his collaborator thought up an improvement to the so-called greedy algorithm a way of quickly getting an approximate result, and presented their paper at Sixth International Conference on Autonomic and Autonomous Systems, March 2010 - Cancun, Mexico, and has been subsequently published by IEEE proceedings.Prof Rajesh Babu analyses the dilemma of protecting traditional knowledge and recommends a way to do that under the existing TRIPs/WTO regime and presented his paper, International Protection of IPRs in Traditional Knowledge and Folklore, at the International Conference on The Challenging issues under WTO at Koh Samui, Thailand, October 2009The increasing demand for internet connectivity has resulted in access points sprouting up everywhere: in parks, shopping malls, restaurants, etc. Efficient algorithms are needed to connect wireless nodes such as a Laptop or a Mobile Phone evenly to the many Access Points available. Prof Uttam Sarkar of the MIS Group along with his co-author proposed a new algorithm to do this using the emerging 802.21 standard and their paper, Balancing Load of APs by Concurrent Association of Every Wireless Node with Many APs, was presented at the 5th International Conference on Networking and Services in Valencia, Spain in April, 2009.Prof Asim Pal and others devised a new algorithm for improving the co-ordination mechanisms in e-market Supply Chains and presented their paper, Cooperative Game for Multi-Agent Collaborative Planning, at the International Conference on Operations Research at Hong Kong in March 2010.To round off the rich work in our MIS Group, Prof Asim Pal, used game-theoretic concepts in another problem area, that of detecting so-called sybils, pseudonymous entities, that launch malicious attacks on computer networks and his paper, A Discriminatory Rewarding Mechanism for Sybil Detection with Applications to Tor, was accepted at the ICCCIS 2010 at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in March, 2010We have all watched in amazement as international commodity prices doubled between 2005 and 2008 and then in a six month period halved to a level that wiped out all the increases. How did this violent fluctuation affect the lives of the 400 plus million people in the Asia Pacific region whose lives are dependant on agriculture. Did the price increase benefit them as producers and since they are also commodity consumers, did it hurt them? Prof Parthprathim Pal of the Economics Group studied this issue and drew some policy implication for developing countries for the ongoing WTO negotiations. His paper, Commodity Price Movements and Their Impact on Human Development: Evidence from Asia and Policy Options, was presented at the 9th International Working Group on Gender and Macroeconomics conference, at Bard College, New York in July 2009.Neo-classical economic theory postulates that growth rates between countries should ultimately converge because technology, capital and other supply side factors can, in todays world, freely move around from country to country, but putting this theory to test has posed formidable methodological problems. Prof. Manisha Chakrabarty of our Economics Group and her co-authors presented a paper proposing some methodological solutions to this at the Tenth Islamic Countries Conference on Statistical Sciences at American University of Cairo, Egypt in December 2009.Basing promotion and compensation decision on a rational and formal Performance Appraisal system is seen as a hallmark of professional and modern companies and is generally believed to be free of political and power and control issues. How does it fare in the Indian corporate situation which is believed to be relatively more paternalistic and relationship oriented than in other cultures? Prof Amit Diman of our Human Resources Group devised an instrument for measuring the appraises perception of Performance Appraisal Politics and his paper, Performance Appraisal Politics from Appraisees perspective: Exploration in Indian Context was presented at the Academy of Management conference held at Chicago in Ausust, 2009.Industrial Relations theory has largely been a creation of the Anglo-Saxon industrial experience. How does it fit the new paradigm in India in which an old formal economy of heavy industry and public sector enterprises, co-exists today with the new formal economy of IT and Financial Services and the massive informal economy of casual labour and petty trade which forms the majority of Indian employment? Prof Debashish Bhattacharjee and his co-author undertook a sweeping study of both the historical evolution of Employment Relations in India from 1947 right down to the effects of the Global Recession of 2008 as well as an equally magisterial look at how the Indian academic tradition of Industrial Relations has gradually transformed itself into the Human Resource Management movement. His paper, Comparative Industrial Relations Narratives and their Relevance to India, was presented at the 15th Congress of the International Industrial Relations Association meeting in Sydney, Australia in August, 2009.Our newly formed Public Policy and Management Group has kicked off to a great start.Profs Bhaskar Chakrabarti and Raghabendra Chattopadhay addressed the problem of developing the right measures for judging the effectiveness of Local Government Bodies and presented their paper, Administrative Reforms for Local Governments in Rural West Bengal at the Annual Conference of the International Association of Schools and Institutes of Administration, at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil d August, 2009.The same team presented two other papers, Village Forums or Development Councils: Peoples participation in decision-making in rural West Bengal and Local Governments in rural West Bengal, and their Coordination with Line Departments at the Commonwealth Local Government Conference in the Bahamas in May 2009 and a third paper titled, Decentralization of Irrigation Management in India: Problems of Participation and the role of Water User Associations together with Suman Nath at 5th Annual International Conference on Public Administration, in Chengdu, China October, 2009.Prof Manish Thakur, of the Public Policy Group did one of the few academic studies available on Indias giant National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. He points out that the value of this scheme should not be judged merely by the preset targets they achieve but also by how they mobilize the poor and also sets in motion the consolidation of a constellation of interests which for years to come will help the poor articulate their collective rights. His paper, Public Policy Interventions and Social Inclusion, was presented at 5th Annual International Conference on Public Administration, 2009 held at Chengdu, China in Oct 2009.In his paper, Social Welfare through Business: Study of Home Based Ayah Service for the Aged, Professor Kalyan Sankar Mandal of the Public Policy Group presents an example of how a business can contribute to social welfare. This paper was presented at the 9th Conference of Asia-Pacific Sociological Association at Bali, Indonesia in June, 2009.Prof Mandal also took a look at the prospect of private sector initiatives helping out in the gigantic task of improving primary school quality in his paper, Towards Universalising Primary Education: A Business Solution presented at the International Conference on Primary Education held at Hong Kong, November 2009.Last year, the film Slumdog Millionaire, poignantly portrayed the despairing lives of people in our great cities. India now has over 35 such metropolitan areas each with a population of over 1 million. Over a 100 million Indians now live in such metropolitan settings and they live in unequal access to health care and education. Prof Annapurna Shaw of our Public Policy Group studies what she calls place inequalities at the metropolitan level in her paper, Metropolitan Governance and Social Inequality in India which was presented at the conference on Metropolitan Inequality and Governance in International Perspective held at University of Southern Californea, Los Angeles in January 2009 and at the 105th meeting the Association of American Geographers at Las Vegas on March 2009.In a rare look at Indias Small and Medium industrial companies who collectively produce 40% of the industrial output of our country, Prof BB Chakrabarti, presented a paper titled, Capital Structure of SMEs a Puzzle that Merits Attention: The Case of India, based on a ten-year data set of 1300 such companies and presented at the West Lake International Conference on Small & Medium Business held at Hangzhou, China in October, 2009. What is exciting about this paper is that it was produced collaboratively with a business organization, Bitscrape Solutions and is hopefully a sign of more such collaborations that will come in the future.Banks wooing all of us through SMS barrages on our mobile phone, television advertising, and advertising in newspapers and billboards is a feature of Indias new landscape of a hyper competitive consumer banking scene. Yet , there are few studies on how do Indian consumers judge service quality of banks. Prof. Koushiki Choudhury of Marketing Group took a shot at this and her paper, Exploring the Dimensionality of Service Quality: An Application of TOPSIS, was presented at the 4th International Conference on Services Management at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, U.K. May, 2009.Complete flexibility in allocating products to manufacturing capacity based on realized demand is the holy grail of modern manufacturing. However, this kind of total flexibility where all plants can produce all products can be a costly solution. Could there be an optimum combination of plants and products that maximizes the ability to meet demand and at the same time minimizes various types of costs? Prof. Ashis K Chatterjee of Operations Management Group demonstrates how this can be modeled and his paper, Benefits of Partial Product Flexibility, was presented at the 23rd European Conference on Operational Research, Bonn, Germany in July, 2009.Signaling a new class of studies where our professors collaborate with those of international universities, Prof Rahul Mukherjee of our Operations Management Group, collaborated with Prof Hong Chang of Chosun University, Korea in presenting a paper, Highest Posterior Density Regions Based on Empirical-Type Likelihoods: Role of Data-Dependent Priors, at New Zealand Statistical Association Conference at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand in September, 2009. This paper has since been accepted for publication in the prestigious Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference.Prof Saibal Chattopadhyay, of the Operations Management Group also presented a paper, Exponential Clinical Trials: Sequential Comparison under Asymmetric Penalty at the same New Zealand Conference.Professor Bodhibrata Nags book titled "Optimal Design of Timetables for Large Railways: a framework to maximise schedule robustness and minimise resource deployment, using a multi-objective mathematical model" has been published by VDM Verlagsservicegesellschaft mbH, Germany in February 2010.Dealing with the demand uncertainties of short life cycle products such as fashion goods have always posed a challenge. Prof Balram Avitatthur, of our Operations Management Group with his co-authors, developed a mathematical model to do deal with the associated procurement and transportation discount structures and this paper has been accepted for publication in The International Journal of Production Economics, from Elsevier.Indian media and policymakers are fond of pointing to Indias youthful population and the demographic dividend. Prof Janakirman Moorthy looks beyond to the year 2050 when India will have three times more people in the 60+ age group than we have now and tries to draw some implications of this. His paper on this phenomenon was accepted as a book chapter in The Silver Market Phenomenon Business Opportunities in an Era of Demographic Change, Edited by Florian Kohlbacher, and Cornelius Herstatt. Prof Moorthy also contributed, Cross-National Logo Evaluation Analysis: An Individual-Level Approach, to the September 2009 issue of the international journal, Marketing Science, and an article titled, Buying behaviour of consumers for food products in an emerging economy to the British Food Journals second issue of 2010.Prof Jacob Vakkayil, co-authored a chapter titled, Conflict Management and Resolution in the book, Doing Business in India, published by Routledge.He also contributed a paper, Dynamics of Multiple Memories, Reflections from an Enquiry, to the Sage journal, Journal of Management Enquiry. I found it one of the most valuable ruminations I have read in recent years about one of the frontier challenges in the new knowledge economy. Companies try all sorts of methods to capture as organizational Memory what they learn as they go along in business: project documents are stored in databases, case studies are caused ot be written, white papers and best practice documents are created, reviewed by gate-keepers and stored. These are then used in knowledge-sharing sessions. Yet, to new entrants all this seem like just another training session. Knowledge Management efforts in many companies lead only to disappointment. Jacob, then wonders what is the nature of Organization Memory? Is it one or is there a plurality of memories? Are organizational memories messier and more improvised than we think? Are local, relational memories more effective than global ones? Are there communities of practice with two strands, one inside the organization and the other extending beyond into other organizations? Are there tentative, nebulous memories which are more real than the grand schemes of long-term storage and retrieval?I found these reflections on the very nature of knowledge breathtakingly inspiring and I feel it deserves to be heard beyond the confines of a Sage management journal.And it is also a fitting book-end to my review today of the exciting intellectual effort going on at IIM Calcutta. I hope you got as much pleasure in listening to this recounting as I did in preparing this summary.Stay tuned to MBAUniverse.com for more speeches from IIM-C convocation!

MBA in India vs. MBA abroad

Management education in India is booming. There are over 1,250 approved business schools, 1,25,000 full-time and 1,00,000 distance MBA students and 1,30,000 MBA aspirants taking the Common Admission Test every year.

The end-users the recruiters seem to be facing a constant supply crunch, and are always on the lookout for the talent graduating from the top B-schools.

Thus the MBA is a valuable commodity that insures a quick return on investment.

With the burgeoning of the Indian economy and the growth of India's middle-class, more Indians than ever before are able to afford brand name American degrees.

While foreign applications to American B-schools have dropped with visa restrictions post-9/11, applications from Indian students are increasing.

Coupled with this is the fact that many of the foreign-bound MBAs plan to return to India after graduation, a complete reversal of the brain-drain in the 1970s and 80s.With increasingly larger number of aspirants looking at MBA abroad, what are the pros and cons of an MBA in India vs. MBA abroad?

Is it worthwhile to get an MBA abroad? This decision depends on a number of factors and ultimately has to come from you. We present these factors before you, on making this vital decision.

Assess the cost

The cost is, of course, the bottomline. For the average Indian, a foreign MBA is very expensive; at the least an MBA degree abroad will cost you around Rs. 10 lakhs to Rs. 15 lakhs.

Normally, an MBA from the top-tier schools in the U.S. will cost you around Rs. 25 lakhs to Rs. 35 lakhs. Given the exorbitant expenditure (assuming that you are not getting any scholarship, as getting aid for an MBA programme is difficult), is it worth it?

Look at the resources at your disposal (your own bank account, your parents' or a benefactor's).

The funds available would throw up various options:

If you have half the funds required (Rs.10 lakhs to Rs. 15 lakhs), you can go ahead.

If you have one-fourth the funds required (Rs. 5 lakhs to Rs. 6 lakhs), you can manage the first few semesters. You will have to find ways to raise money while studying (an option many Indian students resort to).

If you are constrained for cash, but can manage a bank loan, you need to think hard.

Are you confident you would do well in the programme? Would you manage to get a job?

Prime MBA destinations are the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The chances of employment are better in the U.S. and Canada.

Getting a job in Australia and the U.K. is comparatively difficult. Even if you do spend Rs.15 lakhs doing an MBA abroad, you would be able to recover the money within a year of passing out, provided you have the grit and determination to do it.

At this juncture, we should not underestimate the value of our Indian MBA. Indian MBAs have proved themselves in MNCs working as VPs, directors, senior consultants and partners. Consider the purchasing power parity, initial expenditure (cost of the programme), initial placement and growth in salary as inputs in your decision. The options before you should lead your choice.

If your choice is between the IIM and a top-tier global institute, choose the latter. The global institution would provide strong alumni network, worldwide placements, diverse class and global brand recognition.

The diversity of student body and networking is a definite plus in a foreign MBA. The students from a top-tier foreign school would have three to four years of work experience. They come from a variety of backgrounds such as finance, IT, marketing, even poetry, television and films.

A variety of students come from different countries a British journalist, an American banker, an Arab entrepreneur and you an Indian IT professional working either as sales or software engineer. You would be able to develop a network across countries, which could hold you in good stead.

A typical Indian MBA class would have less than 10 per cent students with work experience from IT, manufacturing and sales jobs, with a majority being freshers.

If your choice is between a mid-tier B-school abroad and an average Indian institute, you could choose to go abroad. Do not choose any foreign B-school that selects you.

Post-MBA

Finally, you need to decide what you plan to do after your MBA. Do you wish to take up your career abroad or in India? This is probably the most defining factor in your decision.

If you are planning to take up a job abroad, go for a foreign MBA. It helps to jumpstart a global career with easier possibilities of repayment of loan. If you plan to return to India on completion, you need to think through.

Compared to foreign B-schools, Indian institutions offer cost advantage, making them more attractive if you are planning to build your career in India.

Are you sure you want to take on a liability of Rs. 25 lakhs or more a year for an overseas MBA? The MBA at an Indian institute would cost around Rs. 4.5 lakhs, not counting the lodging expense.

Funds tied up, B-schools rankings should determine the final decision: Is the value proposition of the foreign B-school better than that of the B-school you have chosen in India?

Finally, irrespective of which school you get into in India or abroad, you need to prove yourself once you join the workplace. You need to market and sell yourself, having the MBA behind you.

If you are selected to the top-tier 50 schools abroad, go for it. If you are selected for MBA in India in the top 15 schools, assess the pros and cons.

An MBA degree abroad costs around Rs. 10 lakhs and above.