XIM-B to open new campus in Orissa

XIM-B to open new campus in Orissa

Kalpana Pathak / Mumbai April 23, 2007

One among India's top 10 B-schools, the Xavier's Institute of Management (XIM), Bhubaneshwar will soon be opening another campus in India. The institute has big expansion plans and is scouting for a 100 acre land in Orissa near its existing campus in Bhubaneshwar.

The new campus will be an extension of the Bhubaneshwar campus and XIM will need Rs 50 crore to go ahead with its expansion plans. The institute plans to raise the money through alumni support and other sources.

XIM has applied to the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) for permission to double the student admission capacity for both -- its full-time and part-time business management programme. Currently the institute admits 60 students each to both the programmes and plans to increase the student capacity to 120 in the next year.

The institute also plans to increase the capacity further by 60 students in the next five years. It will celebrate 25 years of its existence in 2012 and wants to complete the expansion plans by then. "Once we have appropriate infrastructure -- hostels, classrooms and faculty in place for new students -- we will look at increasing the student capacity further," says Father E Abraham, director XIM-B.

The institute has recently increased its fee from Rs 3.96 lakh to Rs 4.35 lakh for the two-year business management programme. The increase will come in effect this year. Says an XIM-B professor, "The increase in cost of education along with other expense like infrastructure maintenance, salary revision of faculty members and upgradation of facilities for students has made us revise our fee structure." The new campus will have more emphasis on technology based learning. "We already have video conferencing facility in our present institute. We plan to bring it more in use at the new campus," says Abraham.

XIM-B's idea to have another campus in Orissa comes from the fact that steel and IT companies are setting up base in the state. South Korean steel major Posco and Arcelor Mittal have already announced plans to set up plants in Orissa and IT majors Infosys and Wipro too are bullish on the state. "This industrialisation of the state is a positive signal and will help us gain a stronger ground considering our brand value with the corporates," says Abraham.

Incidentally, placements at the institute this year saw JP Morgan Chase offering the highest domestic salary of Rs 12.75 lakh per annum to the PGDBM batch. The highest international offer made was by Olam International at US $85,000 (Rs 37.4 lakh) per annum. The average salary for the batch rose by 23 per cent this year and stood at Rs 8.77 lakh per annum. The average domestic salary was Rs 8.52 lakh per annum while the median salary was Rs 8.5 lakh per annum. The institute saw maximum representation from he IT industry including companies like IBM, Cognizant, Infosys, TCS, Mindtree, Wipro, et al.

A total of 98 companies across sectors had shown interest in recruiting students and 72 of them were slotted for the final placement process. New companies on campus included HLL, Dell International, Deloitte Consulting, UBS, HSBC Global Resourcing, Cognizant Technology Solutions, Idea Cellular, Hutch, Grow Talent, Centurion Bank of Punjab etc.