A highly respected teacher and researcher, A. Thillai Rajan, associate professor of finance, department of management studies at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras, believes in constantly changing the department’s business management curriculum to connect it with industry. A senior Fulbright fellow at the Centre for Business and Govern-ment at Harvard University (January-June 2010) and former visiting fellow at the Macquarie Graduate School of Management, Sydney, during his seven-year career as a business management teacher, Thillai Rajan has received numerous accolades including the Outstanding Young Management Teacher Award of the Association of Indian Management Scholars International (2009).
Newspeg. On August 27 last year, Prof. Thillai Rajan was awarded the Innovation in Pedagogy Award 2011 of the Management Teachers’ Consortium (MTC) at the MTC Global Annual Convention held in Hyderabad.
Direct talk. “I use varying techniques to make classroom teaching-learning intellectually stimulating for students. One of them is the simulation method under which students are divided into groups and actually run their own hypothetical companies. They make crucial decisions required to make a business successful and acquire valuable entrepreneurial insights. I also attach great importance to case studies set in the Indian context and have written seven of them. Another pedagogy initiative is to involve students in discussions and analysis of the Indian business scenario for which we often invite heads of companies whose problems and situations are under study, to listen and participate. In addition, industry experts from different fields are regularly invited to interact with students and share their knowledge,” says Thillai Rajan.
Career history. A chemical engineering graduate of BITS Pilani, Rajan began his career with Thermax Ltd in 1995. However, a year later he took time off to enrol in a doctoral programme at IIM-Bangalore, and signed up with Infrastructure Leasing and Financial Services (1999-2002) followed by a stint in Infosys Technologies (2002-2005). In 2005 Thillai Rajan switched tracks and joined IIT-M’s department of management studies, which currently boasts 130 business management and 100 research students instructed by 25 faculty.
This career switch provided him the freedom and opportunity to introduce new pedagogies to enrich the classroom experience, drawing upon his industry experience. “There has been little emphasis on creating appropriate learning material in Indian manage-ment education and we largely rely on case studies related to the US and European contexts. This has to change and we must tailor our curriculums to meet the changing needs of Indian industry,” says Rajan.
Future plans. Rajan believes contextually relevant study programmes are vitally important for improving practices and productivity in Indian industry. “We are working on several research projects which will boost the productivity of India Inc. Among them is a study of the impact of private sector participation in infrastructure development, the outcome of which will hugely benefit policymakers. In business education, I foresee the emergence of one-year MBAs and greater emphasis on executive management programmes in the near future,” he says.
Hemalatha Raghupathi (Chennai)