The Hindu Business Line : Internship placements present a mixed picture

Even as we sit far away from the mayhem of Wall Street, the effect of the global meltdown can be felt in the campuses of the country’s premier management institutes. Come November, it is the time for summer internship placements in most B-schools in India. The summer internship placement process sees thousands of first-year students of the post-graduate in management securing projects for summer internships in various companies. These companies offer stipends to them for the two-month training period.

So far, there have been mixed reactions from the management institutions. “Companies that used to go to a number of campuses have restricted themselves to fewer institutes this year. For example, retail companies recruited in large numbers last year. This year, not too many of them were seen at the campuses,” informs C. S. Venkatratnam, Director, International Management Institute in New Delhi.

Similarly, at the Gurgaon-based Management Development Institute (MDI), the summer placement process has been slow this year vis-À-vis previous years. “The process used to take just a couple of weeks earlier; this year it has been more than six weeks and the recruitment is not yet over,” said an institute official insisting on anonymity. The institute invited almost double the number of companies that it did last year to avoid any fall outs. Venkatratnam attributes this downfall to mainly a couple of reasons: One, there is downsizing across industry sectors, there may not be much in terms of work that they can offer to internees. Second, most companies are busy achieving their own numbers and other targets due to which many companies may not be able to devote time and energy on internship students. He also said public sector companies such as IOCL were recruiting in large numbers this year as compared to previous years.

With apprehensions of economic slowdown prevailing at the campuses, many management institutes approached more companies than they have done in the past. “We did not want to sit as the snob IIM waiting for companies to arrive at our campuses. This year, we decided to approach almost 1,000 companies, out of which 120 came,” confesses Professor Saurav Mukherji, Associate Professor of Organisation and Strategy, Chairperson Placements, Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Bangalore. Of the companies that participated in IIM-B, 110 recruited, out of which there were 56 new companies. The New Delhi-based Indian Institute of Foreign Trade (IIFT), on the other hand, did not see a decline in the number of companies participating in the summer recruitment. “Of course, 17 of our students are yet to take up projects, the rest have got decent internship programmes combined with industry-standard emoluments,” said K.T. Chacko, Director, IIFT. The institute saw a rise in the average stipend from Rs 28,000 last year to Rs 35,000 this year. Chacko insists there has not been much of a deviation in the trend from that of the last year following the economic slowdown.

The mood was upbeat at the Ghaziabad-based Institute of Management & Technology (IMT) too. “There has not been much change in the pattern this year. Of course, there is a drop in the number of banking and insurance companies participating, but all our students have got very good internship projects and have been placed extremely well,” confirmed S.S. Sahay, Director, IMT.

IIMs in Ahmedabad and Kozhikode and Delhi University’s Faculty of Management Studies (FMS) have witnessed 100 per cent placements this year despite having increased their batch size by 40–50 per cent in most cases. IIM-Lucknow that announced its summer placements results did not witness any change in the trend except that a lot of students opted to intern with start-ups.

IIM-K saw an increase in the number of firms to 102 from last year’s 66 participating in the process. Companies such as HSBC, Standard Chartered Bank, Coca-Cola and Nestle were seen recruiting for summer internships at the Kozhikode campus. At IIM-A, close to 300 students of the post-graduate management programme got placed for summer internship programmes. Surprisingly, for a batch of 21 students of the two-year agri-business programme, there were 28 offers made by the participating companies.

While admitting that IIM-A is not immune to the global meltdown, Prof Samir Barua, Director, IIM-A said that it will be affected to a relatively lesser degree than the other business institutes as it is at the top of the pyramid. Meanwhile, a lot of students declined overseas offers to take up domestic internships. The Planning Commission was also present at the campus and made four offers. Contrary to claims of many of the IIMs, insiders revealed that at some of these premium institutes, professors have given internal projects to students to achieve the 100 per cent mark. And, that the situation does remain a bit gloomy at these premier institutes as well.

(With inputs from Divya Trivedi.)