AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

NT Bureau
Chennai, Dec 1:

        Great Lakes Institute of Management (GLIM), a Chennai-based business school, would be shifting their location from Saida-pet to their own campus building on East Coast Road.

        The 3-year old B-school is being run at a leased premises and the institution would acquire a 14-acre land in which a sophisticated, full-fledged campus would come up with ultramodern amenities. In the first phase, GLIM has plans to set up a building with a floor space of 1.25 lakh sq ft. 'The new campus would be a sophisticated one with hostels, amphitheaters, electronic classrooms, staff qu-arters and spacious playgrounds,' said S Sriram, executive director, GLIM.

        Talking to newsmen yesterday, he said the proposed campus would enhance the learning ambience of the students, even as the institute was focused on to boost its knowledge capital by taking new faculty on board. 'Around 40 per cent of our faculty will be from foreign countries to impart a cutting edge knowledge to our students,' he said. The construction of the new facility would start soon and the campus would be ready by 2008.

        Started by well-known academicians in the US with support from Indian corporates, GLIM has aims to become an Institute of Excellence in Management education in the country within 2 years. In addition to the existing chair professorships, GLIM has announced Gopal Srinivasan, MD, TVS Electronics, and K B Chandra-sekhar, chairman, Jamcra-cker Inc, have donated Rs one crore each for setting up chairs into two domains.

        During the visit of management guru Philip Kotler, the institute has identified Marketing as its core area of expertise and has targeted to become reputed for excellence in marketing. Explaining the rationale for the thrust on Marketing, Sriram informed the B-school has unstinted support from marketing professors of the world. Besides Philip Kotler, GLIM had got teaching assistance from Seenu V Srinivasa of Stanford University and Paul Prabhakar, dean, School of Business, at the University of North Carolina, among others.

        To focus on its core expertise, Kotler Srinivasan Centre for Marketing Research was set up recently. This centre received financial as well as knowledge support from both the professors on which it was named. This research centre would function under Yale - Great Lakes Centre for Management Research.

        When queried on the possibility of reservations in the seats for the socially backward classes, he said unless the government made it compulsory for private B-schools, they would not introduce quotas in the admission system. Also, Sriram clarified there were no immediate plans to introduce Ph Ds at the GLIM. The B-school would introduce a college journal by next year that would reflect the latest trends in Management Sciences.