For the first time in the country, the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, is designing a course for the management of sports organisations.
The one-week course will be offered from the current academic year though the curriculum is still being evolved taking into account the requirements of different sports, particularly individual games and team events, Director Samir Barua said here on Wednesday.
The idea of developing the ‘Professional Management of Sports Organisations' came from a foreign expert whose services had been requisitioned by organisers of the Commonwealth Games in Delhi. During a lecture at IIM-A, he advised the institution to develop the course, which would go a long way in promoting sports and helping to organise national and international events.
The popularity of the Indian Premier League (IPL) was another encouragement for IIM-A to consider launching the course, being developed by faculty member Jerome Joseph, himself a former sports person. Dr. Barua denied that the course was being devised at the behest of the Board of Control for Cricket in India, and said the BCCI or the IPL had nothing to do with IIM-A.
Short-term courses
The sports management course would be one of the 11 new short-term ‘Management Development Programmes' on offer in the new academic year, taking the number of MDPs in different courses available in IIM-A to 67. These include ‘Strategies for Growth', ‘Innovation, Strategies and Corporate Performance', ‘People's Issues in Business Process Outsourcing', ‘Advanced Quality Management', ‘Risk: Modelling and Management' and ‘Human Resource Management' which would be partly imparted in Dubai.
Among the new elective courses to be offered to students of IIM-A's flagship course, Post-Graduate Programme (PDP) in Management, are ‘New Technology Applications, Design, and Business Models', ‘Communicating Corporate Reputation', ‘Public Finance', ‘Revenue Management and Dynamic Pricing', ‘New Product Strategy' and ‘Public Policy'. The last one would try to conceptualise the myriad challenges in public policy and construct a socially sensitive and purposive policy framework.
About his institution opening campuses abroad, Dr Barua said though the Centre had given the green signal, IIM-A was not sure whether it would have the resources and other facilities for this exercise in the next few years.
As for the Udaipur IIM, for which IIM-A is acting as the “mentor,” helping it with designing curriculum, training faculty and, if necessary, providing faculty support, he said it was expected to become functional from the next academic year. The Centre had already appointed C. K. Birla, chairman of Hindustan Motors, chairman of the Udaipur-IIM Board, and the process of appointing other directors was under way.
On a Common Admission Test for admission to various management institutions, Dr. Barua said all IIMs had together decided that the online CAT had come to stay, and the tie-up with Prometric, the agency which conducted the CAT last year, would continue. However, “corrective measures” were being taken to ensure that problems like computers crashing which marred the first online CAT last year.
On the golden jubilee of IIM-A, which starts on December 11, he said one of the major events to mark the celebrations was developing the contributions of the alumni in various fields globally. Taking only the flagship PGP courses into account, the IIMA had more than 8,000 alumni but with MDP courses, the number would be more than 60,000.
Dr. Barua said the financial crunch which IIM-A had experienced in the last couple of years, following the implementation of the Sixth Pay Commission recommendations, was a “thing of the past.” It would now tide over the situation even without substantially increasing student fees, except accounting for the inflationary increase in prices every year. He admitted that the corpus fund had dwindled to about Rs 51 crore from about Rs 175 crore available before the construction of the new campus, but “now we will be able to build the corpus fund again.”
