IIM students give placements a miss!

Excerpts from Power Breakfast on CNBC-TV18 Watch the full show » Nifty BSE | NSE 13/02/12 Are Mutual Funds betting on Nifty?

A ticket to the IIMs comes with the promise of a six-digit salary. But some students across top IIMs have chosen to opt out of the placement process. CNBC-TV18 finds out why.

Arun Balakrishnan, a 25-year-old student at IIM-Ahmedabad worked with Lehman Brothers at Tokyo for his summer internship. But today, as the institute kicks off its placement process, he is not appearing for any job interview. Instead, along with his batchmate, Kaushik Mukherjee, he is about to launch an online market place, Lootstreet.com - a site where you can buy, sell and even bargain for a cheaper price. Both these students have an engineering background and two years of work experience before joining IIM-Ahmedabad. But when they started considering this venture, their key concern was finding capital.

Arun Balakrishnan said, "We had the backup of our internship stipends. But more than that, we have been participating in a lot of contests across b-schools. The prize money we both have is about four lakh rupees. That's going to be our seed capital."

For their two-month summer internship, they were paid a stipend of Rs 6 lakh each by Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs. Of course, if the enterprise is a success, they will also consider venture capital as a funding option.

Students opting out of placements to begin their own ventures is now being encouraged by institutes. At IIM-Ahmedabad, in case the business fails, students can come back and appear for job interviews during placements within two years of their passing out.

In fact this is an emerging trend across IIMs. This year, 11 students dropped out of IIM-Ahmedabad placement, five from IIM-Bangalore and one from IIM-Calcutta. Last year, 11 had opted out from IIM-Ahmedabad while IIM-Calcutta had no dropouts. Clearly, students are now ready more than ever before to test their nerves and risk-taking ability in their quest for entrepreneurship.