A total of 592 students from the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, passed out from the prestigious institute and received their graduation certificates at the 40th annual convocation held on Friday.
Speaking at the ceremony, Sushil Vachani, director, IIMB, spoke about the growing international appeal of the institute: “This year, we launched new international field courses and dramatically raised the number of PGP (post graduate programme) students who travelled abroad for study from 34 per cent of the batch to 64 per cent. In our Executive Post Graduate Programme and Public Policy and Management programmes, 100 per cent of our students spend time abroad. We hosted students from several countries around the world, including, recently, from Myanmar. Such exposure prepares our students for leadership in the world economy.”
Taking note of the rapid growth of entrepreneurship, Dr Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, chairperson, Board of Governors, IIMB, and Managing Director of Biocon, urged students to think like “entrepreneurs and not just managers”. “Creative disruption is radically altering how companies operate in virtually every industry and region of the world. We are now witnessing the advent of ‘the ideas economy’, which is spurring an entrepreneurial ethos that is spawning startups at an enormous scale,” she said.
Commenting on this entrepreneurship spirit fast spreading among fresh B-school passouts in the field of e-commerce Shaw quoted the Nielsen Campus Track Business School survey 2015, according to which one in every nine students from the 2013-15 batch prefer to join an e-commerce firm or a startup after graduation, as compared to just one in 19 students in the 2012-14.
Dr Devi Shetty, chairman, Narayana Group of Hospitals, the chief guest of the ceremony, delivered the convocation address and spoke about a new model of health cover for Indians that he was envisaging with the help of India’s 850 million mobile phone users. “I’m telling the government that if each one of these phone users can pay Rs 20 a month of their mobile bills, we can provide health insurance to all,” he said.
Likening this to the Yeshasvini insurance scheme, which he helped to set up in the State, he said: “The government accepted the proposal to collect Rs 5 per month from every farmer to provide them health insurance 10 years ago. Today, just by paying Rs 5, more than 7.10 lakh farmers have received treatment, and 85,000 underwent heart surgeries,” he said.
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