The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : B-school to set up own campus on ECR

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Sunday, Dec 03, 2006
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Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

B-school to set up own campus on ECR

Staff Reporter

First phase to be completed by 2008

CHENNAI : Great Lakes Institute of Management (GLIM), Chennai-based B-School, is setting up its own campus on a 14-acre site on East Coast Road.

The wholly residential campus will have amphitheatres, electronic classrooms, auditorium, staff quarters and playgrounds.

Work on the first phase of the Rs. 25-crore project involving a built-up area of 1.25 lakh sq ft is expected to commence in January and be completed by 2008, in time for the admission of the batches for that academic year in April, S. Sriram, GLIM executive director, said at a press conference on Thursday.

The eco-friendly campus will have an aggregate built-up area of around 1.8 lakh sq ft.

When the campus is ready, GLIM will be able to increase its intake from 160 students for various management streams to 250 candidates. This is apart from the enrolments for its executive MBA programme.

According to Mr. Sriram, GLIM has resolved to promote marketing as its core competency without compromising on other management sub-domains. The decision was inspired as much by the urge to stand apart from existing schools of excellence in the country as by the relative lack of marketing skill sets here, he said.

The institution's faculty model with its focus on quality has restricted the number of teachers to around 20 as opposed to the between 70- and 80-strong faculty of most B-schools. It draws from intellectual support from an illustrious panel that includes marketing guru Philip Kotler and marketing research icon Seenu Srinivasan. The Kotler-Srinivasan Center for Marketing Research functioning under the Yale-Great Lakes Center for Management Research will focus on developing marketing research in India.

The institute will also leverage the high proportion of south Indians teaching management in the U.S. to strengthen instruction at GLIM, Mr. Sriram said. Plans to bolster its permanent faculty from five to eight soon will improve its teacher-student ratio from the current 1:30 to 1:15.

GLIM plans to expand its Chair Fellowships programme by taking new faculty on board as a means of enhancing its knowledge capital. Contributions of Rs.1 crore each by Gopal Srinivasan, Managing Director, TVS Electronics; and K.B. Chandrasekhar, Chairman, Jamcracker Inc.; will go into establishing Chair Fellowships in two management sub-domains.

Other plans include launching a research journal, doubling the adjunct faculty representing visiting professors (who also assume research responsibilities) to 12 in six months and evolving a Ph.D programme in the next five years.

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