India Inc supports Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore's plan to set up a centre in Singapore and wants the government to reconsider its decision to allow premier engineering and management institutes to expand overseas, an Assocham survey says.
Over 85 per cent of the 150 chief executives and managing directors surveyed by Assocham said the apprehension that the overseas expansion plans of IIM-B would be at the cost of domestic expansion was misplaced.
The corporate honchos, many of them IIM or IIT products, said the global expansion would enhance their brand equity overseas and add to the reputation of students passing out of these well-known schools, Assocham said in a release.
More than 90 per cent of CEOs said Indian B-schools like IIMs have already established their reputation among the best employers in the world, but there was a ground to cover to join the league of the best in class such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the release said.
The government had recently shot down a proposal by IIM-B to sign a memorandum of understanding with Singapore for setting up a center there.
The Union ministry of human resources development had said while the IIMs may be autonomous, they should not be treated like profit-making bodies.
"Expansion of management and technological institutions on the global scale would go a long way to improve quality of Indian human resource," Assocham president Anil Agarwal said.
The proposal should not be treated as a profit-making proposition alone, he said. It would bring in a lot of value addition, he said, adding that institutes that can do without budgetary constraint on the government, should be allowed to expand, he said.