New Delhi, Sept. 6: The new Indian Institutes of Management started this year seem to be struggling to fill their seats, marking the beginning of their journey on a rough note.

IIM Nagpur, IIM Amritsar and IIM Bodhgaya have started classes for the first batch of Post-Graduate Programme (PGP) students without being able to fill the 60 seats in each.

The institute in Bodhgaya has just 30 students, or half the number it can accommodate for the course (see chart).

The admission process is on in three other new IIMs - Sambalpur in Odisha, Visakhapatnam, and Sirmaur in Himachal Pradesh.

The new IIMs are all being mentored by the older ones. IIM Indore, for example, is mentoring IIM Sambalpur, which was supposed to start classes in the first week of September but deferred the date to the fourth week because of the low rate of acceptance of admission offers, sources in the older B-school said.

IIM Indore has decided to hold the registration on September 23, when students submit fees and certificates for verification and enroll for the course.

IIM Visakhapatnam and IIM Sirmaur - mentored by IIM Bangalore and IIM Lucknow, respectively - are likely to register students shortly.

An IIM Bangalore official said the B-school's faculty members had designed the academic programme for IIM Visakhapatnam. "They (the IIMB faculty) will be available to the students of IIM Visakhapatnam for interaction and discussion."

The official said the Bangalore institute, one of the oldest IIMs in the country, would leverage its industry connections to ensure that IIM Visakhapatnam students enjoyed as holistic and transformative a learning experience as their peers at IIM Bangalore.

The proposal to set up the six new IIMs had come last year, in the budget for 2014-15, but it was only on June 24 this year that the Union cabinet finally gave its approval after locations for the campuses were finalised.

By the time the cabinet nod came, the older IIMs had already completed admitting students and started classes for this session.

Professor Manish Kumar Thakur of IIM Calcutta, which is mentoring IIM Bodhgaya, said students who had cleared the Common Admission Test (CAT) were offered seats, but the admission process continued for sometime as it depended on the rate of acceptance. "These are initial hiccups associated with any new institution," Thakur said.

Former IIM Kozhikode director Debashis Chatterjee, however, said MBA or PGP courses were no longer considered an automatic passport to jobs because prospective employers were choosy about which institutes applicants had graduated from.

The new IIMs, he said, have not established their credentials yet, and are therefore not getting a good response from students.

Chatterjee said the older IIMs should have ideally incubated the new ones on their main campuses in the initial years to create the right ambience and campus culture.

The system of asking faculty from the mentor institute to visit the new institute may not also be implemented properly, he added.

But Thakur felt that mentoring and replicating the admission practices of older IIMs could be an effective way of creating academic culture and incubating the new institution in the mentor institute was not necessary.

IIM Ahmedabad, which is mentoring IIM Nagpur, conducted the admission process for almost a month and managed to fill 55 seats.

IIM Kozhikode is mentoring IIM Amritsar, which has admitted 46 students.

An IIM faculty member said locational disadvantages had also discouraged students to join some of the new institutes.