In 1992, I went to work for a new business school in Hyderabad called Vignana Jyoti Institute. This was an autonomous business school, and therefore we
could devise our own curriculum. We were also starting from scratch- that
means, we five or six faculty members would be the primary architects of the
Post Graduate Diploma in Management (PGDM).
The promoters were a group of mid-sized
industrialists from Hyderabad,
and this was their first foray into education. The director was from
Administrative Staff College of India (ASCI), well known for its Executive
Development programmes. There was a batch of twenty students in the first
batch, many of whom were related to the promoters. But that was no problem, as
they were mostly bright people. The small class size made it an enjoyable
experience. We knew every student by name, and the quality of the interaction
was high.
Sudhir, one of the
students from this first batch would become a colleague at another institute a
few years later, where he joined as a research associate. In general, the first
two batches of students spread the good word, and Vignana Jyoti earned a good
name in the city while we were there. Thomas, in H.R. , Venkata Rao in Quanti,
Sudha in Accounting and Finance and Dayakar Rao in Eco were the colleagues, and
I handled marketing. Some more joined after a year, but these four remained
close because we had done things from scratch, together.
The institute was
located in West Marredpally, a very good
location to travel to for most of us. There was also a post office and an Irani
café for other needs nearby. For lunch, we could go to Garden restaurant for a
biryani, or Kamat for a thali. I ate a lot of biryani in the three years I
spent there, usually accompanied by Thomas.
While at Hyderabad, we had an
inspection from AICTE, for approval of the PGDM program. This program in India is
considered as the equivalent of the MBA degree, and is made famous by the IIMs.
Luckily for us, my paper had been published in a top American journal, the Academy of Management Journal, just that year, and
that issue was available in our library. That got us some brownie points with
the inspection team, and we did get the recognition from AICTE. This later
became a coveted recognition, but not many parents believed then that PGDM was
as good as an MBA. India
could be the only country in the world where a degree is inferior to a diploma,
at least in management!
We also managed to
do a couple of Executive Development Programmes while at the institute. These
were fairly basic, on Human Resource Management or General Management, but
helped to network with industry. One of the memorable industry experiences was
of Dr. Reddy’s Labs, who came and discussed with me at length one of the
assignments I had given to my marketing students based on an article on pharma
patents- Indian pharmaceutical manufacturers used to copy foreign drugs and
used to change the process by which they were manufactured. They were protected
by Indian law, which in 1995 did not recognize Product patents for drugs- but
only recognized process patents. So, as long as you changed the manufacturing
process, you were OK. This has changed since then, but the issue of
intellectual property was hot then. I was impressed to see a pharma company
taking the time to discuss this with me. Indian companies were not particularly
proactive in reaching out to the academia then. This was much before the I.T.
boom!
The ICFAI business
school had just started in Hyderabad
at around that time, and was probably suffering initial hiccups like high
faculty turnover. But in about 10 years’ time, they grew by smartly scaling up,
and expanding to different centres in India. They added 100 extra
students every year, until their combined intake was higher than all the six
IIMs put together!
One other major
event I remember was the launch of Global Trust Bank, the private bank floated
by Ramesh Gelli, in the post-liberalisation era. Earlier, many years ago,
Indira Gandhi had nationalized all the private banks. This launch was significant
for many reasons. Though the bank suffered from problems later and had to be
taken over by another one under RBI directions, it paved the way for the
emergence of stronger private banks in general, like HDFC, ICICI, and later,
Kotak Mahindra, UTI (now Axis Bank) and
Centurion etc. It definitely spurred the public sector, nationalized banks to
start thinking about their future survival.
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