IIM- Ahmedabad director Bakul Dholakia with faculty members: Dholakia says his biggest challenge is to attract and retain top-class faculty

As of March 2002, India had 840 B-schools which churned out 65,000 MBAs. Europe had only 338 B-schools. The number of MBAs coming out of Europe was also lower by nearly 25%. Before we start a round of back-slapping and high-fives, consider this: not even India's No. 1 business school would find a place in any global 20 B-school ranking. But it desperately wants to make it to that league. "We want to be among the Top 20 global B-schools by 2010," declares Bakul Dholakia, director of IIM-Ahmedabad, the top ranker in the Cosmode-BW survey.

To realise this king-sized ambition, IIM-A will have to do many things: build a more diverse student body, attract students from other countries, give students more global exposure and get more international recruiters. But Dholakia's biggest concern today is the faculty. "My single-most important challenge is to attract and retain top-class faculty. Everything else I can manage if I have this."

The Cosmode-BW survey clearly shows that faculty is the No. 1 factor that separates a top school from the rest. And if that's what is keeping Dholakia awake at night, imagine just how piquant the problem must be for other B-schools in the country.

There is a very strong caste system in Indian management education. And this survey helps you identify the Brahmins or the B-schools that are trying to create knowledge. These are the Top 15 B-schools in our ranking - integrated business schools like the older IIMs and XLRI that do quite well when it comes to teaching, research, publication and consulting.

All four attributes are necessary for building world-class academic institutions.

"Research - with its impact on industry and society - counts for a lot in worldwide rankings, which ISB (Indian School of Business) is aiming for. All the best schools in the world have very strong research," says Pramath Sinha, principal, McKinsey & Co. and the founding dean of ISB (the school is yet to participate in any ranking exercise).

The next 25 schools on our list make up the second tier. They fall short on one or more parameters related to research, publication, consulting and faculty qualification. The rest of the B-schools in the Top 100 are part of the third tier: most of them are primarily teaching schools, with almost non-existent research capabilities.

The survey findings prove that faculty and research output is the key differentiator between the three tiers. On average, tier I B-schools have 50 full-time faculty, tier II have only 24 and the rest 17. When it comes to percentage of faculty who have a doctorate, the respective figures are 73%, 47% and 35%.

This trend is faithfully mirrored in the average number of books published as well as the number of papers published in refereed journals (see 'The Faculty Factor').

That faculty makes the difference can also be seen from a stark comparison between IIM-Indore and IIM-Kozhikode. IIM-Indore has slipped to 23 from a more respectable seven in Cosmode's last survey, while IIM-Kozhikode has managed to hang on in the Top 15.

IIM-Indore basically lost out on the faculty parameter. The scoreline - IIM-Kozhikode full-time faculty: 24. IIM-Indore: 17. The former also had three books and 14 papers in refereed journals as against one book and 3 papers from IIM-Indore.

A Cosmode estimate shows that Indian B-schools have 3,600 Ph.D.s in all. What they really need are 11,000. The gap is not going to be closed anytime soon: the Top 100 B-schools produce around 110 doctorates annually while an additional 20-24 come from overseas every year.

But if you really want a sense of how important the issue of faculty and research output is at Indian schools, talk to the IIMs perched on top of the list. "We want to increase our faculty and some good people are not necessarily willing to come to Kolkata. Getting faculty is the most important concern for us. We need people in marketing, organisational behaviour and HR," says B.N. Srivastava, dean of IIM-Calcutta.

Prakash Apte, the director of IIM-Bangalore, says the B-school is finding it tough getting the right kind of faculty in areas like HR and marketing.

What the best B-schools want today is faculty who aren't fixated on teaching - a research-orientation is a must. How IIM-Ahmedabad is attempting to bring in a research orientation provides some important cues to the future of management education in India.

"If we have to retain our competitive edge, then we have to continuously look for contextual and relevant teaching material. That means we look for the best faculty that does research, and that too, faculty with international exposure," says Dholakia.

IIM-Bangalore director Prakash Apte and the faculty: Apte says getting faculty in areas like HR and marketing is difficult. Especially faculty with the right kind of quality and research orientation..

It won't be easy. Tarun Khanna, a Harvard Business School professor who has written a case on the globalisation of Harvard, says research is the most important feature of a global B-school. "This (a research core) then translates into excellence in teaching and great students and other virtuous cycles." Khanna points out bluntly that IIM-A has no reputation for research. "Indian B-schools are still in the dissemination mode."

Many of them are now trying to change that. "We are entering our next phase of growth and have plans for increasing our executive education programmes, increasing the number of MBA students, strengthening our faculty base and promoting research," says Vijay Mahajan, dean, ISB. The B-school has started a post-doctoral research fellowship programme to both create a pool of research fellows who would assist faculty in their research projects and also boost the ISB faculty. The two-year programme includes a 12-month module where the research fellows would work with pre-assigned faculty members at ISB or at partner schools - The Kellogg School of Management, The Wharton School, London Business School or other leading institutions.

The ICFAI Business School, which is a multi-centre B-school, has come up with a rather novel way of kick-starting research and give its faculty international exposure. ICFAI's Institute of Management Teachers in Hyderabad offers a three-year programme called Management Teachers Programme leading to a Ph.D. "In the third year they will be doing only research. During that research, we are also working out arrangements with about half a dozen universities in the US for a 'visiting scholar scheme'. These people will go and spend one year in those universities at our cost," says V. Panduranga Rao, director of The ICFAI Business School.

IIM-A knows it too has to come up with inventive ways of getting quality faculty and building a research core - and fast.

If there is one thing working in Dholakia's favour, it's plain, old-fashioned doggedness. A staff member who has worked with him for over 20 years says he has the ability to visualise and analyse any situation. "Once he has done that, he is particular that it is done exactly the way he conceived it."

This isn't the first time Dholakia has a key responsibility at IIM-A. I.G. Patel, then director of IIM-A, made him the chairperson of the PGP programme in 1983-85 with a specific mandate - comprehensively review and restructure the two-year programme. The review and implementation was through in two years. And when Dholakia took over as director in October 2002, IIM-A did not even have all the permissions from the municipal council to set up the new 39-acre campus. Today over 80 students are staying at the hostel there.

"One difference between him and some previous directors is that he is trying harder and also trying to involve everybody. You have to carry the faculty with you - it can't be done by just the director," says a faculty member. Dholakia plans to hold a workshop in 2-3 weeks with all faculty members to get their buy-in on his globalisation vision.

That may be the easy part. He will still have to convince the government, which has a big say in everything that IIM-A does. "Government norms are also a constraint - they have rules like a faculty member can go abroad only once in three years to present a paper at an international conference. These rules are designed for an average institution, not for an institute of excellence," says a faculty member.

Fortunately Dholakia has a super-lobbyist to help him out.