HYDERABAD, 22 June — The city-based Indian School of Business, promoted by 50 top corporates from across the globe to train the business leaders of the future, is all set to kick off its operations on July 1. ISB Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Pramath Sinha told newsmen on Wednesday that Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu would inaugurate the first batch of 130 students enrolled for the one-year post-graduate program on July 1. However, regular classes would commence on July 4.

Though the formal inauguration of the school building on the sprawling 250-acre campus at Gachchi Bowli on the city outskirts is slated for December this year, the management is starting the program from July since the requisite facilities are in place for the first batch of students. Four permanent faculty members and 32 visiting faculty members will conduct the course.

The ISB is affiliated with Kellogg Graduate School of Management (Northwestern University), Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania) and London Business School. These prestigious management institutions have helped the ISB in designing the curriculum. They have also agreed to provide visiting faculty to ISB and help it establish a research center. The deans of these schools will sign the ISB graduation certificate.

The ISB is being set up with a massive outlay of three billion rupees. The school will have an intake of 260 students in the academic year 2002 and 520 students by 2003. It will have 16 permanent faculty members by 2003. The school will start short-duration executive education programs in November this year. The campus will provide the students with state-of-the-art infrastructure, global connectivity, wired classrooms, recreational facilities and accommodation in ‘student villages.’

Sinha said that out of the 130 students enrolled in the first batch of the PG program, 20 are women. The batch has an average GMAT score of 690, work experience of 4.5 years and average age of 26 years. They were selected out of 1,000 applicants after an elaborate process. Thirty-one students are married and the others are single. “Our students are comparable to the best in leading B-schools across the globe and their GMAT score is considered to be pretty high score by global standards,” he added.

Only one student is from Hong Kong and the others are from India, including 10 NRIs. All the 130 students were employed but 110 left their jobs to take the course. They worked in leading Indian companies and multinational corporations such as Accenture, Citibank, Arthur Anderson, GE Capital, HLL, HP, ICICI, Infosys, ITC, Reliance, Wipro and Satyam. They have varied background in fields such as engineering, sciences, software, and fashion designing.

The one-year course costs one million rupees, including tuition fees of 750,000 rupees and boarding and lodging expenses of 250,000 rupees. The ISB has tied up with the ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank and State Bank of India (SBI) for student loans. Almost 50 percent of the students have availed the bank loans. A dozen students are offered scholarships this year.

The course is divided into eight terms of five weeks each and offers students specialization in technology, entrepreneurship, analytical finance and strategic marketing. Apart from instilling knowledge, the ISB will focus on building the personal skills of its students. The curriculum is prepared to meet the needs of the fast-changing global markets and designed to make full use of the 52-week course period without putting undue pressure on students.

The visiting faculty, drawn from Kellogg, Wharton, London Business School, Harvard Business School, Graduate School (Stanford University), University of Chicago and Duke University, comprises a global mix of academics to ensure continuous exposure to international insights, thinking and research.