Learning to do business in India

Updated on: Tuesday, December 22, 2009

The call from academicians and from a cross-section of corporate India was loud and clear at IFIM Business School's second international conference on ‘Doing business in India.' They were of the collective opinion that there was an immediate need in India to improve the quality of talent in all sectors including IT, and the creation of a skilled workforce.

The conference saw over 125 papers being presented in the fields of general management, economics, finance, HR, marketing, IT, corporate social responsibility & business ethics. The participants included academicians and members from the corporate world from India, the U.S., the U.K., Germany, Iran and Bangladesh.

The participants were exhorted to do continued, meaningful research in the areas in which they were presenting their papers by K. Kannan, retired Chairman Bank of Baroda, who was the chief guest at the inaugural function of the conference.

The challenge

Swami Krishnan, CEO & Director of IFIM Business School, said, “India definitely has a very young talent pool and it will continue to have it till 2050. But the challenge for us academicians is to make the students industry-ready as they graduate, as that is the need of the hour.”

The conference also witnessed an intriguing panel discussion on the topic of ‘Doing business in India.' The panellists included Sushma Abburi, Co-founder of minglebox.com, Sanjay Tambewekar of Netapps, and Rajesh Rathod, founder of Angst & partners.

The panel discussion was moderated by Prof. Swami Krishnan. The panellists urged the fresh graduates to be open to taking a few risks at the beginning of their careers.

This, according to them, would help them chart a good career path and catalyse growth. These fresh graduates will shape the destiny of India in becoming a great destination to do business and contribute immensely in the coming decade which possibly can be considered as the decade of India.

The conference concluded with cash prizes being awarded to three best papers presented at the conference. The first prize of Rs.10,000 was awarded to Nirmalya Bandhopadhyay, faculty of International School of Business & Media, Kolkata, for his paper on ‘Application of SERVQUAL and Kano's model in determining service quality in health club services.'

The second prize of Rs. 5,000 was awarded to Jaya Sankara Prasad, Department of Business Management, Krishna University, Andhra Pradesh, and Ramachandra Aryasri, School of Management Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, Hyderabad for co-authoring the paper on ‘A study on situational factors on store format choice behaviour in food and grocery retailing in India.

Learning to do business in India

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