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LATEST
NEWS |
13th
March 2010 / Times of India / Hyderabad Edition
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 Finally, green signal for ISB Mohali campus
Hyderabad: After legal glitches and delays of nearly a year, the decks have finally been cleared for Hyderabad based premier B-school Indian School of Business (ISB) to finally drive into its second campus at Mohali, with the Punjab cabinet finally giving the green signal for allotment of a fresh parcel of 70-acres of land within the upcoming Knowledge City campus in Mohali.
The Mohali campus, which is now slated to be up and running in time for the academic year 2012, is to be set up at an investment of Rs 200 crore and will be funded entirely by donations from four India Inc top guns Max group founder and chairman Analjit Singh, Bharti group CMD Sunil Bharti Mittal, Atul Punj of Punj Lloyd and the Munjals of Hero group.
The Punjab cabinet cleared the allotment of a fresh parcel of land a week or so ago. We hope to get possession of the land by March end and expect to begin construction in the next 3-4 months after inviting bids from developers, ISB dean Ajit Rangnekar told TOI here.
We will have to redo the design of the new campus a bit as we had already prepared the blueprint based on the initial land allotted to us, Rangnekar added. ISB had engaged a New York based architectural firm to design the Mohali campus, the land for which is being allotted to ISB on a 99-year lease at a token amount of Re 1 per acre.
The 70-acre site initially offered to ISB in the upcoming 350-acre Knowledge City in Mohalis Sector-81 ran into legal troubles after some farmers, who had sold land to the government in that stretch, dragged the Punjab government to the Supreme Court, where the matter is still pending.
With the legal dispute already delaying ISB’s plans to kick off its Mohali campus by 2011 and threatening to further delay the project, the Bschool had issued a deadline till March 2010 for the Punjab government to sort out the issue and had even begun scouting for other alternatives in North India.
Though the 70-acre Mohali campus is much smaller than the sprawling 260-acre Hyderabad one, it will have a capacity to eventually accommodate 560 students but will kick off with a capacity of 210 students and over a dozen resident faculty members. The Hyderabad B-school campus currently has 570 students and nearly 40 resident faculty members.
Apart from the basic MBA programme, the Mohali campus will also offer specialized programmes in healthcare, infrastructure, manufacturing and public policy.
After we have completely utilized the Mohali campus, we will start expanding the Hyderabad campus in which currently only about 80 acres of land is being utilized, Rangnekar pointed out. |
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