Alliance School of Business, Bangalore

Consistently ranked among the country’s top 20 non-IIM B-schools, ASB is now the flagship institution of Alliance University, which was conferred private university status in 2010

Promoted in 1996 by Dr. Madhukar Angur, an alum of NIT-Surathkal, IIM-Ahmedabad and University of Texas, and former professor at the University of Michigan, in a small building in Bangalore with an enrolment of 100 students, the Alliance School of Business (ASB) has since transformed into a full-fledged university, with a nationwide reputation for disp-ensing globally benchmarked business management as also law and engineering undergraduate and postgrad education. In the inaugural EducationWorld-C fore India’s Most Respected non-IIM B-schools Rankings 2013, ASB is ranked #19 among 50 B-schools countrywide. Moreover, in the CNBC-TV18 B-schools Rankings 2012 it was ranked #6. Currently ASB, housed in a spanking new 40-acre campus on the Chandapur-Anekal road on the periphery of Bangalore, offers business management education to 2,000 students instructed by 89 full-time faculty.In 2010, ASB was conferred private university status through a special enactment — the Alliance University Act, 2010 — of the Karnataka state government. Alliance University is also recognised by the University Grants Commission and the All India Council for Technical Education. “Over the past 17 years, ASB has established an excellent reputation and has been consistently ranked among the top 10 private B-schools in India by the media and business publications. In 2010, the Karnataka state government conferred private university status on ASB mak-ing us Karnataka’s second private university after the Azim Premji University established the same year,” says Dr. Anubha Singh, pro vice chancellor of Alliance University.

Consequently, ASB is now a consti-tuent school of Alliance University which also boasts law and engineering colleges with an aggregate enrolment of 3,000 students. With the autonomous Alliance University empowered to confer degrees, ASB has expanded its academic menu from the two-year MBA and other short-term diploma progra-mmes to offering bachelor’s (B.Com, BBM), Masters (M.Com, MFM) and Ph D programmes in business management. “From its inception, ASB has focused on offering internationally benchmarked business management education thro-ugh contemporary pedagogies deliv-ered by highly qualified faculty. More than 50 percent of our faculty have Ph Ds with teaching experience of 10-15 years. ASB’s two-year postgraduate MBA programme is reputed as one of the most rigorous in the country and our graduates are in senior positions in  India Inc. Moreover, as a constituent school of Alliance University we are one of the few B-schools countrywide to offer doctorate programmes in business management with specialisation in business studies, human resources and finance. Currently 50 students have enrolled in our Ph D programme,” says Dr. Ravi Raj Kumar, a business management doctorate of  the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, USA, and currently dean of ASB.

According to Raj Kumar, ASB students also have the opportunity of signing up for several short-term add-on certificate programmes offered by the in-house Centre for Development of Entrepreneurship and Leadership, Centre for Cognitive Sciences and Centre for Foreign Languages. More-over ASB has signed academic colla-boration agreements with over 40 foreign universities including University of Central Florida, USA; Paris School of Business, France; Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, China; European Business School, Germany; Togliatti Academy of Management, Russia among others, for student exchange and study abroad programmes.

Unsurprisingly, ASB graduates are highly appreciated by Indian industry. Last year, the B-school’s campus recruitment and placement programme attracted over 200 high-profile corporates including Amazon.com, American Express, Citibank, HDFC, HSBC, ICICI, Oracle, IBM, Trident, Wipro, Zomato, among others who absorbed the entire batch of 250 MBA graduates at an average salary of Rs.8 lakh per year, with the highest remun-eration package topping Rs.18 lakh.

High-quality faculty and contem-porary pedagogies apart, ASB offers excellent  academic and co-curricular infrastructure. The 40-acre campus houses spacious amphitheatre-style classrooms, seminar halls, a well-stocked library with 25,000 volumes and 200 journal subscriptions, a gymnasium and fitness centre, football field, indoor sports centre, department store, healthcare centre and a unisex salon. Separate halls of residence for 600 men and 400 women students and accommodation for faculty are also provided on campus. Construction of the Alliance University engineering, law and other schools on a contiguous 105-acre site is proceeding apace and is expected to be completed by 2018.

Looking ahead, Raj Kumar is confident that ASB will improve its respectable ranking among the coun-try’s B-schools. “Continuous curr-culum improvement and global bench-marking is our prescription for nurturing industry-ready managers. We have recently introduced a new policy for continuous faculty development under which every faculty member is expected to complete a doctorate programme within five years and students will be given intensive soft skills and leader-ship training. Our institutional goal is not merely to improve our national reputation but to be ranked among the world’s top 100 B-schools within the next decade,” he enthuses.

Wind in your sails.

Sangeetha Samuel (Bangalore)