With admission for the new Indian Institutes of Management batches beginning in February and the first stage of the 27 percent OBC quota set to be implemented from academic year 2007-08, IIMs are gearing up to accommodate the 'extra' students on their campuses.
IIM Calcutta will convert few flats of its faculty's residential building into hostel to accommodate new students. IIM Indore will make students share rooms and will also use its Management Development Programme centre to work out the accommodation details.
At other IIMs, students will be equally divided in the existing sections. Infrastructure upgradation at other will be a need only in the next two years when student admission will increase on a huge scale. For instance, IIM Ahmedabad, will be using available space in its new as well as old campus. The institute has increased the admissions by 12 per cent which means only 30 new students on the campus.
Similarly, IIM Bangalore will not face any problem in accommodating 15 percent more students. The institute at present admits around 250 students, and may increase this number to 270 by 2007.
IIM Kozhikode, too has its infrastructure in place to accommodate the new students for this year.
The institute admitted 180 students last year and this year the strength would increase by another 22 students making it a total of 202 students. IIM Lucknow also has space available to increasing the student number by 45 seats, which it will accommodate in its existing five sections.
However, IIM Indore is not yet ready with the infrastructure and has decided to make the students share the hostels. It will be adding only 15 more students on the campus this academic year. The institute had already expanded the student strength from 120 to 180 last year.
Says S P Parashar, director, IIM Indore, "Space is a problem for us. This year it is not a substantive increase so we have decided that we will add five more students to the existing class capacity of 60 students across our three sections."
On the faculty front, the institute has 30 faculty right now. It needs 10 more and has already recruited seven of them. For the next year, the institute will increase the student strength by 60 percent and for the year after, 100 percent.
IIM Calcutta has converted few flats of its faculty building to accommodate more students.
The student strength at the institute will increase by six per cent (18 more students) in its existing capacity of 300 students.
The institute had already increased the batch size last year from 250 to 300 students. While this year IIM-C will 'adjust', the institute has already started planning for the next two years when it will roll out 30 per cent and 18 per cent quota. It has assigned the campus development plan to an architect.
The institute had plans to develop a satellite campus in Salt Lake City in Calcutta, but with the quota coming in force, it dropped the plans and instead asked the state government for 50 acres of land near its existing campus.
With inputs from Archana Mohan in Ahmedabad
