(Photo credit: IIM Ranchi temporary campus by Vijayakrishna Kandula)

Breaking away from the tradition of Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) campuses being distributed building clusters spread over hundreds of acres, the new IIM Ranchi campus due to be constructed by 2014 will be a high-rise campus with ten-storey buildings.

In a public notice inviting tenders from construction consultants, IIM Ranchi has described the proposed campus to have one six-storeyed academic building containing 30 hi-tech classrooms and eight to ten hostel buildings of ten-storeys each comprising a total of 2,000 single rooms for students. Additionally, there would be 500 apartments for faculty, staff and Management Development Program participants and an auditorium with a capacity of 2,000. Of the 79 acres of land allotted t0 IIM Ranchi, about 45 acres will be constructed over for now. The entire project is expected to cost Rs 400 crores.

This will make IIM Ranchi the tallest but also the smallest of all IIM campuses. While the older IIMs at Ahmedabad, Calcutta, Bangalore and Kozhikode each have a campus size of at least a 100 acres, those at Lucknow and Indore have campuses of over 150 acres. Of the new IIMs started up since 2009, IIM Udaipur has experienced the biggest real estate windfall with 253 acres while each of Raipur, Kashipur, Rohtak and Trichy have been given more or less 200 acres each.

“We asked for a good piece of land near the city center instead of a large tract of land far away from town like the rest of the new IIMs. Land costs are higher inside the city so the size is smaller. But if we grow vertically, 45 acres is enough to construct a world-class institute,” IIM Ranchi director Prof MJ Xavier told PaGaLGuY, adding that the architecture of the campus was being planned to be on the lines of University of Massachusetts or Chicago-Booth GSB, both of which have chosen to have their business schools in high-rises instead of distributed buildings as in the older universities such as Harvard or MIT. The campus will be one of the attractions that IIM Ranchi plans to pitch to attract international students.

The academic block of IIM Ranchi’s proposed campus will be a circular structure of six storeys containing classrooms on the first and second floors and faculty rooms in the levels above, described Prof Xavier. There will be an open area in the middle covered with a roof serving as a student sit-out area. As many as 20 classrooms will be equipped to broadcast lectures over broadband to the hostels as well as outside the campus.

The 2,000 student capacity hostels will be constructed in a quadrangular arrangement with the central section containing sports and recreational facilities.

“In about 7 to 8 years we will have 2,000 students on campus once we start sectoral MBA courses in business analytics, human resource management, health and energy management,” said Prof Xavier justifying the capacity being built.

Apart from being high-rise buildings where day-to-day existence will be centered around elevators, the entire campus including the hostels will be fully airconditioned. According to Prof Xavier, the energy costs of such an electricity-hogging campus will still be lesser than what it takes to maintain a larger hundred-acre campus with its landscaping costs. Further, the IIM Ranchi campus will strive towards getting a platinum rating in energy efficiency by installing facilities such as those to recycle food waste to manure, treating used water for reuse in toilets and gardening, he added.

The hi-tech nature of the campus is however expected to drive up the cost of education at IIM Ranchi. “If you want a world class face-to-face environment, you will have to pay for it. We will also be offering distance learning programs with differential pricing for those who cannot afford the face-to-face experience,” Prof Xavier remarked.

“We will nevertheless try to reduce the costs of the MBA programs by using revenues earned from corporate training programs,” he added.

IIM Ranchi’s 79 acres campus land has been sliced out from the Birsa Agricultural University campus located at Nagari-Kanke, about 15 kms from the Ranchi airport. The institute was earlier allotted 214 acres at the same location, but in September the Jharkhand cabinet took a decision to strip away 139 acres from the campus. Despite repeated attempts, nobody was available from the Jharkhand Department of Higher Education to disclose the reason behind the land reduction.

IIM Ranchi is at present temporarily operating out of the premises of Suchana Bhavan, a government office building in Ranchi.