The Department of Management Studies (DMS), Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi, is likely to be rechristened to ‘IIT Delhi Business School’. “The idea might fructify by the end of this year or the beginning of the next year, according to my expectations,” Prof MP Gupta, admissions coordinator of DMS, IIT Delhi told PaGaLGuY.

“The (IIT Delhi) director has extended his support to the idea, and so has the chairman. At this stage, we are working on the proposal to convert DMS into the IIT Delhi Business School. This is subject to several layers of discussions and approvals,” Gupta said.

“Firstly, the change would lead to a general image makeover. A b-school within IIT Delhi will put us in a different light to the outside world. We would like to be ambitious enough in putting all the ingredients of an ideal b-school into our proposal,” he elaborated, explaining the reasons behind the change.

The rechristening process would not require too much government intervention. “Powers are vested with the board of governors of an IIT to take development-oriented decisions. The term ‘DMS’ will however remain on paper as it is part of our legal nomenclature as per Parliament approval,” Gupta said.

Along with a news name, the management institute is also seeking financial autonomy and increase its global exposure. “Because of financial autonomy, the time taken in procuring resources will reduce. Secondly, there will be fewer channels of approval and lastly, a corpus will be available to us,” he said, adding that DMS had been generating Rs 3 crore in revenue. IIT Bombay and Madras already have this level of autonomy.

Further talking about the advantages of gaining this level of autonomy, Gupta said, “Increasing global exposure will enable us to enter agreements with b-schools abroad for exchange of students and faculty, take entire batches to visit emerging markets and other things. Also, we will form an advisory council containing luminaries from the corporate world, whose role will be to promote, advise, guide and facilitate the MBA programme. This will benefit placements among other things,” he said.

DMS also plans to launch a dual-degree programme in 2013 which the institute has previously spoken about, and will be a five-year course combining the BTech and MBA programmes. The course will have to go through five levels of approval before it is launched, though. The institute will go slow on phasing in the programme, with only a small number of MBA seats apportioned to the dual-degree programme in the beginning.

“We observed that we could cater to the demand for a course on these lines as BTech students generally look to pursue an MBA degree. Bringing more IIT graduates into our programme would improve intake quality, and also that of placements,” Gupta explained.