The GIFT society has been organizing this event for past three years as a platform for B-school students and practitioners from the industry to share their views in the area of Flexibility and Change Management. This year the theme of the competition was ‘Building a Resilient Organization’. The theme was selected in the context of growing need for risk modeling and contingency planning in the organizations and the issues confronting in this regard.

The competition was open for all the B-school students and working professionals with more than 2 years of experience. The contest had 31 entries from various B-schools like IIM Bangalore, IIM Calcutta, S P Jain, NITIE, FMS, MDI, DMS-IIT Delhi, IIFT, IMI, SCMHRD and other reputed institutions. The corporates participating in this event included SBI Capital, Knowledge Management Systems and NTPC. After a scrutiny process, 7 papers were short listed for final presentation.

In the keynote address, the chief guest of the function Mr S. B. Khare, Deputy Director General, BSNL shared his views on resilience by defining it as “Capacity of a system which is potentially exposed to hazards, to adapt by resisting or changing in order to reach and maintain an acceptable level of functioning.”

The President GIFT, Prof. P. K. Jain related the theme with the financial considerations of a company in evaluation of a project with varying levels of sales, capacity constraints and thereby applying sensitivity analysis in the decision making process. The Founder President Prof. Sushil emphasized on the pressing need for the building of resilience and invited the B-schools and corporates for the promotion of GIFT society as a medium to convey the message strongly.

The paper presentation session was a grueling session with participants from FMS, NITIE, S P Jain, SBI Capital, DMS IIT Delhi and IMI, Delhi. The presentations were evaluated by Dr Shyam Sethi, former Vice-President Kelvinator India Ltd., Mr Siddarth Tiwari, Adword Manager, Google, Mr A.K. Garg, Chief (Technology), Corporate Exploration Centre –ONGC.

Mr Uttam Thakur and Mr Rajdeep Mittal from NITIE got the first prize, while Mr Sumit Singh Gandhi and Mr Vikash Choudhary of S.P. Jain, Mumbai were the winners of the Runners’ Up prize. The principal sponsor of the event was ONGC, and the associate sponsors were Punjab National Bank and State Bank of India.