Coronavirus lockdown: IIMs likely to start academic session in August

In the wake of the coronavirus lockdown, Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) are contemplating starting this year's academic session a bit late.

According to Business Standard, India's premier B-schools including IIM-Ahemdabad and IIM-Bangalore are thinking of starting their flagship two-year postgraduate programmes in management in August. Usually, IIM academic session starts in July.

IIM Ahemdabad's chairperson Vishal Gupta and IIM-Bangalore director G Raghuram told the daily that they were planning to commence sessions from the first week of August this year as against the usual mid-June. B-schools typically send out shortlists by April 10 which this year was done on May 8.

IIM, on Friday, released the final shortlist of the candidate for the MBA/PGP programmes for the batch of 2020. To take admission in IIMs, candidates have to go for a six-month-long process of tests and interviews. The admission process that usually begins in January with the announcement of Common Admission Test (CAT) results and ends with final batch selection in June.

Shubhasis Dey, admissions chair, IIM Kozhikode told the daily that at his branch, the shortlist of candidates for  PG programme used to be out by April 30. However, due to the lockdown, they have decided to delay the list. Dey assured that COVID-19 lockdown would not affect the batch selection date, which is June 30.

This year, IIM Ahmedabad and IIM Bangalore that usually release the shortlists much earlier also delayed their process to start from May 8.

Vishal Gupta, Chairperson - Admissions, IIM Ahmedabad said that they typically send out invitations to shortlisted candidates in the first week of April but this year the final selections were released on May 8. "IIM-A had completed its new batch admission process prior to the lockdown. The process takes about three months (from January to March) to complete the process from shortlisting for interviews to the final selection," Gupta added.

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