The Indian Institute of Management-Tiruchi, among the youngest of the premier business schools in India, has received a good response from academicians across the world to serve as faculty.
Prof Prafulla Agnihotri, an IIM-Kolkata faculty who took charge as the first director of IIM-Tiruchi recently, said as many as 360 applications were received for 12 posts for full-time faculty. The recruitment process will be over in a month and the classes for the first batch of its flagship post-graduate management programme will commence in June.
Agnihotri said applications were received from countries like USA, France, Philippines and United Arab Emirates other than India. "The applicants consisted of both Indian nationals working abroad as well as foreign academicians. For now we have short-listed one foreign national among 33 others," he said. Faculties from other IIMs have also expressed interest to join the Tiruchi institute. The first stage of the recruitment process is over. Once the entire process is over 12 of them would be enrolled as assistant professors, associate professors and professors for Organisational behaviour and HR, marketing, law and finance, and operations. Besides, full time faculty, IIM-T has also planned for intake of faculty on contract basis, besides roping in specialists for elective courses that would be offered in the second year. Once the recruitment process is over IIM-Tiruchi would be able to boast its own faculty team right from the first year of its inception, a rare achievement as newly established IIMs would be taking the help of their respective mentoring institutes to meet faculty requirement.
The process of framing the curriculum and fee structure is also under way. "Global vision Indian roots is our mantra. If a country forgets its heritage it will lose its future. We would like to have Indian ethos to be inculcated in the curriculum," Agnihotri said. For now the IIM has decided to enrol 60 students in its first batch. "I would like to have students from all disciplines rather than engineering alone," he said. Meanwhile, IIM is also holding talks with industries and multi national companies for partnership.
The IIM is set to commence classes from its temporary campus in National Institute of Technology-Tiruchi, another centrally run institution by the Ministry of Human Resource Development, located in suburban Thuvakudi, about 20 kms from Tiruchi city on the Tiruchi-Thanjavur national highway. Works would commence shortly to convert the classrooms allotted to IIM into state of the art facility matching the standards of IIMs.
Agnihotri said establishment of permanent campus in the 174 acre land allocated to IIM-T adjacent to Bharathidasan University would also commence shortly. "In three years we will be able to move into our own building," he said.
