The Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad is looking at setting up a campus at Hyderabad to offer executive education. In a press notification dated June 29, the institute spokesperson said, “At the instance of the Government of Andhra Pradesh, the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad is engaged in discussions with the Government of Andhra Pradesh for setting up an IIMA campus in Hyderabad.”
The school has recommended the AP government to allocate 150 acres of land and Rs 100 crores in funds for establishing the campus. The recommended area is even larger than the IIM’s original campus at Ahmedabad, which is spread over a total of 116 acres.
“The Institute plans to begin operations by offering Executive Education Programs and subsequently it may explore the possibility of starting academic programs on the campus. The Institute would attempt to link the campus at Ahmedabad with the Hyderabad campus through use of technology, for seamless operations between the two campuses,” added the press statement.
IIMA will be the second IIM to set up an additional campus, the first being IIM Lucknow which set up a satellite campus in Noida in 2005 to offer part-time and executive programs.
The Hyderabad campus materializes as part of Andhra Pradesh’s Late Chief Minister YS Rajasekhara Reddy’s agenda to make Hyderabad an education hub. During his regime, he had aggressively wooed institutions such as IIM Bangalore, Institute of Management Technology (IMT) Ghaziabad, NMIMS Mumbai and Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore to set up campuses in the state. Of these, IMT and NMIMS had accepted the invitations and received land allocations, while IIM Bangalore had declined the offer citing faculty constraints. While IIMA had received the offer more than a year ago, the institute had held back on a commitment due to the political turmoil in Andhra after YS Rajasekhara Reddy’s death followed by the Telengana protests.