>PMO settles turf war between health and HRD ministries

>The Health and Human Resource Development ministries have reached a compromise on regulating medical education and research. The National Commission for Human Resources in Health (NCHRH), piloted by the Health Ministry, will set the standards for university-level medical education. On the other hand, the National Commission for Higher Education and Research (NCHER), piloted by the HRD Ministry, will set the policy guidelines for all medical research. Universities will also be free to have more exacting higher standards for which they will deal with NCHER.

The agreement brokered by the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) will end the turf war between the Health and HRD ministries. This could mean that both bills could be finalised for introduction in the Budget session of parliament. There appears to be a move to bring in Rajashekharan Pillai, Vice-Chancellor of the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU), as the chairperson of NCHER.

The need to apportion medical education between the two proposed regulators became necessary after HRD ministry appointed taskforce on NCHER suggested that higher education in all disciplines should be brought under the proposed over-arching regulator. The exception was agricultural education, since agriculture is a state subject. The move was opposed by Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad and Law Minister Veerappa Moily, as both medical and legal education were to be brought under the NCHER.

The Health Ministry argued medical education was linked to the provision of health services. The Health Ministry’s regulator, NCHRH, was asked to oversee the availability of well trained and competent medical personnel on the ground. This it was argued would only be possible if there had control over medical education. The NCHER task force argued since all education was governed by the varsity system and there were multi-disciplinary areas of research, all education should come under one regulator.

The difference of opinion resulted in an intense turf war. So much so, that the Prime Minister’s Office had to intervene to resolve the situation. In a series of meetings presided over by TKA Nair, Principal Secretary to the PMO, the two sides sought to work out a compromise.

Source: The Economic Times, February 16, 2011

>IT sector in need of hands in all domains: Infosys CEO

>The IT sector is presently recruiting at a strong clip, with a demand for skills in multiple verticals, according to Kris Gopalakrishnan, CEO and MD of Infosys. Ahead of expansion plans for the Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management, Kerala (IIITM-K) here of which he is chariman, Gopalakrishnan told ET that his company had already made 25,000 offers during this financial year. “We have made 25,000 offers in campuses this financial year, and our plans for the coming year will be disclosed in April,” he said, adding that there was a strong demand across various disciplines in the IT sector.

The IIITM-K is setting up a residential campus at the Technocity here, focusing on high power computing and information system management. IIITM-K’s Director-in-charge, Elizabeth Sherly said courses had been designed with the congruence of academics, research and industry requirements in mind. She said the 10-acre campus for IIITM-K in the Technocity campus would help the institute raise itself to a higher level, with the student capacity also moving up from the present level of 120 post graduate students to about 700 students pursuing Masters, M.Phil. and Ph.D. programmes.

The institute is proposing to launch four new schools in its new campus, namely schools for computer science and engineering, computational science, informatics, and humanities and social sciences. Sherly said inter-disciplinary education was a key area of focus, enabling students to tune their skills to contextual requirements.

Source: The Economic Times, February 16, 2011

>For laterals, IIM pay packets take vertical route

>IIMs across the country have reported up to a 25% increase in salaries offered to experienced professionals this year. The highest salary in the lateral placements process so far this year is Rs. 70,00,000 (US$ 150,000), offered to a student at the Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode (IIM-K), by commodities trading company Olam International. Olam has also offered this salary to students at IIM-Bangalore, IIM-Calcutta and the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade (IIFT). In some cases, lateral placements, which mark the beginning of the placements process at IIMs every year, have also reported up to 75% increase in the number of offers this year, over 2010.

Although the older IIMs — including the top three of Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Calcutta — declined to share figures, the biggest gainers as of now appear to be the new institutes. IIM-K, for instance, has reported an increase of 20-25% in the average salary being offered by companies across sectors such as consulting, FMCG, financial services and IT. The highest domestic package on offer is Rs. 3 million, up from Rs. 2.8 million last year, while the highest international package is Rs. 7 million. Several firms such as Fujitsu, Lenovo, Thomas Cook, SunTec, EXL and the Manipal Group have offered senior managerial positions to candidates with as little as three years of experience.

“With the economy looking up, placement offers have been much better this year,” IIM-K Placements Committee Member Nikhil Rawat said. “Students have been able to secure profiles of their choice, and salaries have been significantly higher.” ICICI Bank and Deloitte Consulting have hired 16 students each from IIM-K this year, while Cognizant Business Consulting has picked up 13. Deloitte’s Chief People Officer Dhananjay Bansod said the company is offering 10-15% higher salaries at the IIMs this year, which works out to anywhere between Rs. 1 million and Rs. 1.3 million. The firm is looking to increase its manpower to 15,000 this year, about 3,000 more than the March 2010 headcount. “We expect a growth rate of 15% in India this financial year,” he added.

“This year 85% of the companies will be hiring fresh, according to our survey. This means there is a renewed competition amongst companies to get the best of talent from across institutes, on the back of a revived economy. They have to even compete with international companies for candidates. It’s natural for them to offer competitive such salaries,” says Shamita Chatterjee, business leader, information products and solutions, Mercer India.

IIM-Indore has seen a 10-25% rise in salaries for experienced candidates this year, with pay packets ranging between Rs. 1 million and Rs. 2.5 million. Consulting and IT have been major recruiters with firms such as Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, PwC, Cognizant Business Consulting, Infosys, Wipro Consulting, HCL and TCS picking up candidates. Besides these, companies such as Reliance Power, L&T, RIL and Adani Group have also recruited from IIM, Indore.

Salaries across IIMs had plunged by 25-30% after the global economic crisis hit the world in 2008-09. However, 2009-10 onwards, salaries started recovering by 10-20%. At IIM-K, for instance, average salary in 2007-08 was Rs. 1.48 million, which fell to Rs. 1.01 million in 2008-09 and rose to about Rs. 1.2 million in 2009-10.

IIM-Calcutta, which is just a month into the process, has already received 225 offers, including pre-placement ones. This is an increase of 75% from last year. “With more than 50 firms participating in the process this year, international companies such as Barclays, Olam International, McKinsey & Co, BCG, Bain & Co, AT Kearney, Google, Microsoft and Amazon have notched up an unprecedented number of hires.

Some of them had hired very few people, or given the institutes a complete miss during the slowdown,” said IIM-C External Relations Secretary Abhijeet Kamath. IIM-Bangalore, with a batch size of 348, has already received 96 offers from 31 companies. IIM-B career development services head Sapna Agarwal cautioned that though the number of lateral offers is higher this time than during the corresponding period last year, this could also be because of a larger batch size.

Source: The Economic Times, February 16, 2011