Faculty is the factor that defines the quality of a B-school. But good teachers are not easy to come by. And the reasons are not hard to find. "There is a long 'gestation period' involved," says Debashish Chatterjee, HR professor, IIM Lucknow. "It takes longer for a person to establish himself as a good teacher than to get established in the industry."

Also, teaching is not a very lucrative profession. So a lot of people with Ph.Ds join the industry instead of taking up teaching. "Moreover, the Ph.D programmes in universities are almost bankrupt. They train people in functional silos, whereas in B-schools you are required to do integrative thinking," says Chatterjee.

The Institute of Chartered Financial Analysts of India (ICFAI) has come up with a smart solution to address the problem of getting good faculty for its B-schools: its ICFAI Institute of Management Teachers (IIMT), Hyderabad, trains people to fill up the faculty position in its B-schools.
"We opened IIMT because of a shortage of faculty in our B-schools. We are a growing school - 16 centres already. And every year we can easily absorb 50 as faculty," points out Panduranga Rao, vice-chancellor of ICFAI University.

The training at IIMT is for a duration of three years. After the first two years of their training, a Ph.D qualifying exam is held. Students who qualify in the exam are sent to the US for a year as research and teaching assistants. The first batch of 20 students has already gone to the US. As of now, ICFAI has linked up with about 10 US universities. There, each student will teach one or two courses. And on their return, the students have to do a dissertation based on their research experience in the US university they were attached to. Once the recruits get their Ph.Ds, they are required to serve at ICFAI B-schools for at least three years.

"Right now this initiative is for ICFAI schools only. But in future if we produce more people with Ph.Ds than we require, we might just extend this to other schools (outside ICFAI) too so that they can also deal with their faculty problem," says Y.K. Bhushan, senior advisor, ICFAI Mumbai, whose school will soon benefit from this arrangement.

ICFAI gives students full financial support despite the course being very expensive - it costs between Rs 18 lakh and Rs 20 lakh. The inspiration for this school came from the International Teachers Programme at Harvard and a similar course at Stanford. The two colleges have since then discontinued it. The ICFAI model has been noticed by the US accrediting body AACSB, and it has suggested that other countries could emulate it.