“It is greed to do all the talking but not to want to listen at all”

And thus the Light singed the Moth.....

Imagine this: there are over 2,400 b-schools in India of which 1,999 are approved by the All India Council for Technical Education and 400 function as unapproved private b-schools. Together, they have nearly 190,000 seats for a total pool of 3.5-4 lakh MBA aspirants who sit for the national and state-level MBA entrance exams.

If we hypothetically consider that the average fees charged by these b-schools is about Rs 300,000(which i can assure you is on the most conservative estimates), then the total potential revenue for b-schools in India = Rs 5,700 crores.

As the number of seats are fewer than the total pool of available students, getting students to enroll should not be a problem for these 2,400 b-schools, on the face of it.

Wrong. Every year, since the last 2-3 years, an increasing number of b-schools are finding it tougher to fill the complete intake capacity of their MBA or PGDM batches by the time they begin their sessions in the month of June. I am not talking about 100 of the best known (‘top 50', if you will) b-schools, which have enough pull effect to attract excellent numbers and thereby have the privilege of even providing a waiting-list for prospective students.

The worry is with the second and third tier and the sub-tier of b-schools. Almost all of them are privately owned and funded and many were set up with the noble intention to provide management education to those Indians who could not get through to the best b-schools. Some were also set up to provide education to a special section of the society.

However as of today, death looms large on these b-schools. The primary reason being that they have never figured out the changing dynamics of the market or the way MBA applicants have been choosing b-schools in the past few years.

Consider some numbers for example: in the year 2003, out of the 95,000 odd students who appeared for the Common Admission Test (CAT), the ratio of freshers to those with substantial work experience was about 60:40. Moving forward to 2008 and 2009, the number of CAT takers increased to over 250,000 of which more than 60% had work experience.

In 2003, freshers chose higher education due to the fact that the economy then promised them something really big if they spent two years arming themselves with more skills before venturing out into the job market. In other words, there weren’t many lucrative opportunities available for someone fresh out of undergraduate college. On the other hand, those who were employed for 4 or more years were already happy, or had families and never bothered so much with a 2-year fulltime MBA in India. There were fewer b-schools in the country, and filling up their intake capacity wasn’t that much of a challenge.

Seeing this trend, b-schools started mushrooming all over the country over the next five years, some even trying to replicate the Indian Institute of Management model by opening branches in multiple cities.

In the last couple of years, since 2008, things have been really bad for most of these private b-schools. They have found it tough to fill their classrooms with quality candidates. The student market response to their advertising and branding messages has been appallingly cold. Overall, things look very bad for them.

A deeper look into the trends gives a better idea: the 60+ % applicant pool with work experience has a better idea about what they want to do with their professional lives, and so are averse to settling for a b-school that is not in what is broadly perceived as the ‘top 50'. They have developed sharp expectations from the two years that they will spend at a b-school and the return-on-investment at the end of it. For them, joining any of the 2,000 b-schools at the bottom of the pyramid does not make much sense.

The freshers on the other hand, are always the confused lot. If they get into a ‘top 50' b-school, most will join it in all likelihood. If not, then they start looking at the next best options (driven largely by the kind of placements the remaining b-schools offer). This translates to a very slow decision process, as students try to make sense of the offerings of these schools, which don’t differ too much from each other.

This leads to almost a mini recession-like situation, wherein a couple of thousand b-schools have over 1.5 lakh empty MBA or PGDM seats on offer but no takers. Spending on advertisements in the print media and other publicity avenues (seminars, education fairs) has little or no effect in generating applicant interest. In order to break this standoff, several b-schools get hold of ‘leads’ (a ‘lead’ in industry-speak is the contact information of an MBA aspirant) from websites, coaching institutes or other sources. They then start calling up these freshers at least 30 times to get them to apply. That produces frustration on both ends. The aspirants feel that – “this college doesn’t get any applications and is therefore following up.” For them it doesn’t mean anything that the b-school is looking for genuine candidates to apply to them. Over time, some schools either resign to running on less-than-full student capacity or choose to admit almost anybody, much to the dismay and disillusionment of the good faculty (a rare species in the third and sub-tier schools{lets have more of it some other time}) in the school. The route down the regression road is thus laid out.

Add to that the growing trend of multinational companies recruiting undergraduates for the same jobs (analysts, sales and marketing executives,business development officers, jobs in KPOs, auditor firms, equity research, etc.) that one gets after a second-tier MBA.The only take away from this 2 years of investment of 5 lakhs is a tid better salary thsn graduates and post- graduate degree for marriage proposals.
This is further pushing more fresher applicants towards the experienced category, further reducing their availability to second and third tier schools.

If the b-schools fail to understand this, very soon they will lose their reason to exist, will become financially unviable and will have to shut down. Already, they have optimized their operational expenditures beyond limits (getting visiting faculty, optimized infrastructure usage, class schedules, etc). If they don’t take corrective steps right now, then they will surely be heading for a sad end.

There is still hope. These b-schools will need to look inward and ask themselves some very important questions:

1. What is lacking in them that they do not have a ‘pull effect’ like the top-100 do?

2. What have b-schools such as ISB Hyderabad or Great Lakes, Chennai done that has allowed them to gain a reputation in less than a decade?

3. Do the marketing and admissions teams in these schools have more members than the total number of fulltime faculty members?

4. How do these schools do when put to the scrutiny of the best academic standards and fora?

The trouble is that with the kind of ’sweatshop way’ of working that these b-schools internally have, it is difficult that they will see the light. Extinction is a big threat and sooner or later they will have to think of questions that matter, or perish.


These events will have a spin off effect of many kinds effecting the social fabric economically and socially going a long way in moulding the social mindsets of our people.
More to it as sson as i finish off my exams....

Is there a permanent solution except allowing private companies to milk money .. read on.

In the wake of Increasing Health Care Insurance Industry targeting the Bottom Of The Pyramid Structure ... Should we find a permanent solution which is self sustainable and regulatory ???

During the research of one of my projects in Microfinance industry for a Insurance Distribution Network called the D20 , headed by Mr. Mukut Deepak, I stumbled across some of the key alarming facts and solutions. One of them which has been around but have never been taken seriously by our government.

Health care financing in India is in a phrase of changing its page over. It can be considered almost unique in several respects.
One, the share of public financing in total health care financing in the country is considerably low--just around 1% of GDP compared to the average share of 2.8% in low and middle-income countries or even relative to India’s share in disease burden.
Two, the beneficiaries of this limited public health financing are not only the poor as one would expect in a limited public spending to be, but also the well-off section of the society.
Third, over 80% of the total health financing is private financing, much of which takes the form of out-of-pocket payments (i.e., user charges) and not any prepayment schemes.
Fourth, reliability on out-of-pocket payments is not only inefficient and less accountable than other methods of financing, it is also iniquitous to the poor on whom the disease burden falls disproportionately more, who are more susceptible to disease and who are much likely to be pushed into poverty trap.
The World Bank (2002) estimates that one-quarter of all Indians fall into poverty as a direct result of medical expenses in the event of hospitalisation.
Fifth, One of the important challenges facing the Indian health policy experts is: how to convert; While India contains one-sixth of the world population, its share in Disability-adjusted Life Years (a measure in which two-third weightage is given to mortality and one-third to morbidity, is used to quantify disease burden) make up 21 per cent of the global total. About one-quarter of world’s annual maternal deaths occur in India and 19% of total under five child mortality. The South Asia region contains the largest number of people living in poverty among developing regions, and faces a high burden of disease and under-nutrition associated with poverty. The largest country of this region, India, received negligible external assistance (0.7%) in 1990, unlike other countries of this region for whom external assistance is an important component of health spending, accounting for more than 10% of expenditures. In Sub-Saharan Africa as well external funding constitutes an important source of health financing.

Community based health insurance is more suited than alternate arrangements to providing health insurance to the low-income people living in developing countries.

Insurance sector reform can affect the poor through its effect on the provision of health services (i.e., cost, quality and access) used by the low-income people as well as through its access to financing of health care.

A significant proportion of government spending on health goes into supporting teritary care whose beneficiaries are mainly the non-poor. In the order of priority, public funding needs to be allocated primarily for promotive and preventive health care which benefits the poor the most. Another feature of public health spending is that total states’ spending on health, which accounts for three-fourth of the total public health spending, is more regressive than central government spending.
World Health Report (2000) estimates private spending in India to be 87% of total health spending. Of this, 84.6% is out-of-pocket expenditure, lower only to Cambodia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Georgia, Myanmar and Sierra Leone.
The World Bank (2002) comes up with some other startling observations: that, on average, the poorest quintile of Indians is 2.6 times more likely than the richest to forego medical treatment in the event of illness; that more than 40 percent of individuals who are hospitalised in India in a year borrow money or sell assets to cover the cost of health care; that hospitalised Indians spend more than half of their total annual expenditure on health care.

Predominantly,private out-of-pocket spending into health insurance premium wherebythis amount is collected from a much larger group of insured individuals rather than from the limited number households affected by illness. Another important challenge is: how to provide health insurance to the people who cannot afford to pay (full) premium.
One of the unique solutions which seems to have started on its own is Community based health insurance because of its certain features like the, the voluntary participation of the people, not-for-profit objective in organising the scheme, scheme management by the community itself, and some degree of risk pooling, is more suited to insuring the poor.

We on one hand must applaud the new surge of capital, interest and participation by private companies and with the other must also make sure that the amount of money which can be milked by private companies in this field must be stunted b Govt. policies and schemes on the lines of Community Health Insurance Plan.

References Drawn from : World Bank Report,2000.
World Health Report,2002.
This is going to serve as a white paper for a detailed paper which i am planning to work on.Do mail me your feedback at avinash.aniket@gmail.com.