Over 40,000 students wrote the CAT 2006 in Delhi alone

In my previous post, I mentioned that early indications showed that around 30,000 students wrote the CAT (Common Admission Test to the IIMs) in Delhi including the NCR areas. Newspaper reports in the last couple of months gave a similar figure and we thought we were right. But by the time the final figures were compiled from the 56 CAT centres in the region, the figure had changed upwards by more than 35%. Including the centres in Delhi, Noida and Gurgaon over 40,000 students appeared for the Sunday's entrance test to the finest b-schools in India. ( Faridabad and Ghaziabad were not given a centre by the IIMs this year)

That's a staggering number compared to only a few years back when I had written the C.A.T. - in 1999, the figure for the entire country stood at 75,000 or so. Now North India alone has that many people writing the test !! With over 2 lakh applicants now across the country, India is awfully lacking in seats in quality b-schools which means that thousands of good students end up pursuing their MBA dreams from an inferior business school. While at IMS, we constantly ask students to not compromise on their choice of an institute, even suggesting them to wait for an year if need be, it's easier said than done. There are not even 10,000 seats in b-schools you would pass as good. So it's hardly a surprise that lots of our students don't heed our advice in this regard. The industry needs far many more qualified professionals than our system is churning out today and there are enough students inteterested in taking up management as a career option, as can be seen by yesterday's enthusiasm. What we need is more top quality b-schools, and soon.

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Post-script:
IMS has taken a step in this direction setting up a b-school at Kolkata. Praxis, as the new b-school has been christened is an IMS Learning Resources initiative in collaboration with XLRI, Jamshedpur.