A PROFESSOR IN IIM-A

AHMEDABAD: For the first time in the history of Indian Institute of Management , Ahmedabad (IIM-A ), a former President of India has agreed to take not just a session but a whole semester for the students. That too, not the students of one course, but across all courses.

Dr APJ Abdul Kalam, one of the architects of the country's space programme and ex-President, will take sessions for students of Post Graduate Programme (PGP), Post Graduate Programme - Agri Business Management (PGP-ABM ), Public Management and Policy (PMP) and Fellow Programme in Management (FPM) from the mid of September.

What is bringing Kalam to the IIM-A campus is the course offered by Professor Anil Gupta, called Globalising Resurgent India through Innovative Transformation (GRIT). The courses were traditionally offered to the PGP-II semester students in the fifth term. A total of 70 students have been selected for this course from across the batches. During the course, Kalam will visit IIM-A thrice and address eight of the 20 sessions in this course.

"The format of this course is somewhat different from the usual courses. Here, the students are going to work on 10 topics which will help us comprehend Vision 2020. These 10 topics are what Kalam calls - 10 pillars - and cover various issues that rural as well as urban India face today," said Srijan Pal Singh, the general secretary of the Student Council.

The students will work in teams on one topic and at the end of the semester, they will have to submit a project report as the course does not have an examination system of evaluation. Some foreign students, who are at IIM-A as a part of a student exchange programme, have opted for the course.