IIM-A developing sports management course

GANDHINAGAR - The Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad (IIM-A) is developing a course for the management of sports organisations, an official said Wednesday.

IIM-A director Samir Barua said that the one-week course would be offered from the current academic year.

“We are, however, working on developing the curriculum incorporating the requirements of different sports,” he added.

According to the IIM-A director, India does not have any such course and the organisers of the Commonwealth Games in India had to requisition the services of a foreign expert for the professional management of sports organisations.

“This got us thinking,” he said.

Barua said the course was being developed by an IIM-A faculty member, Jerome Joseph, himself a former sportsperson.

“Sports management would be one of the 11 new short-term ‘Management Development Programmes’ (MDPs) on offer by the IIM-A in the new academic year which would take the total MDPs on different courses available in the IIM-A to 67,” he said.

Barua said though the centre had given its green signal to the proposal of opening campuses abroad, the IIM-A was still to firm up it’s ideas and do an analysis of it’s resource availability to start such campuses, at least in the next few years.

“We are mentoring the Udaipur IIM and helping it with designing curriculum, faculty training and even faculty support. It is likely to become functional from the next academic year. The centre had already appointed C.K. Birla, the chairman of the Hindustan Motors, as the chairman of the Udaipur IIM board and the process to appoint other directors was already on,” he added.

On holding the common admission test (CAT) for various management institutions in the country, Barua said that all the IIMs together had decided that the online CAT test would stay and so would its relationship with Prometric, the agency which conducted the CAT last year. However, corrective will be applied, he added.