PHOTOS: Indian School of Business celebrates 10 years

The Indian School of Business-Hyderabad celebrated its tenth anniversary on December 2, 2011. We trace the school's successful journey.

The Indian School of Business-Hyderabad was started in the year 1996, almost 15 years ago, by a group of business leaders and academicians led by Rajat Gupta, senior executive of McKinsey & Company.

Their vision was to provide a unique business school offering innovative academic programmes, global faculty and a world-class, yet affordable programme that will create future business leaders of them.

The school was successfully inaugurated in 2001 by the then Prime Minister of India, Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

Soon, ISB launched its first post graduate programme (PGP) in the same year with an initial batch of 128 students, which was further followed by the executive education programmes. Today over 15,000 students have passed out of ISB.

In June 2002, ISB hosted its first graduation ceremony which was presided by the President APJ Abdul Kalam.

In 2011, entrepreneur Adi Godrej took over from Rajat Gupta as the chairman following the latter's resignation over alleged involvement in an insider trading scam.

Among some of ISB's credible achievements include being the first South-Asian B-school to be accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB).

In 2008, ISB became the youngest institution to be ranked among the top 20, in the global B-school rankings by the Financial Times, London.

The ISB has been successful in its vision of providing the best education in business and also making leaders of its students.

ISB has over 3,500 alumni in its full time PG programmes and about 13,000 in its executive education programmes, which includes students and professionals from across the world.

The Indian School of Business was originally envisioned to cater to Asia, and has been successful in helping India emerge as the global destination for management education.

It has a sprawling 260-acre campus in Hyderabad, which offers state-of-the-art academic, residential and recreational facilities for students.

Among its list of firsts include the following 

• The post graduate programme in management (PGP) was the first one-year management programme in India for mid-career working professionals
• The post graduate programme in management for senior executives (PGPMAX) is one-of-its-kind specialist management programme that caters to the senior industry for people with over ten years of work experience.
• The Young Leaders' Programme (YLP) is a unique initiative for undergraduate students to help them realise their leadership potential.

The school's success is due to its emphasis on research-oriented resident faculty and visiting faculty from top-management schools, such as the Kellogg School of Management and London Business School.

It is also known to offer a cutting edge curriculum, which allows students to choose from new elective subjects and along with a case study based approach to teaching along with research projects.

A survey conducted by The Week in November 2011 revealed that it had toppled the Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad to occupy the leading position among business schools in the country.

ISB has announced a second campus in Mohali, Punjab which is expected to get operational in April 2012.

The new campus is aimed to house specialist institutes for promoting research and education in four areas critical to India's development, i.e., healthcare, manufacturing, infrastructure and public policy.

While Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh had graced the five-year anniversary celebrations, President Smt Pratibha Patil visited the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad to join them for their tenth anniversary celebrations, which was held in the first week of December this year.