Calcutta, Feb. 12: Big bucks are back on B-school campus with blue chip companies loosening the purse strings for bright recruits.

If B-school placements are any indication of an economic recovery, this year’s campus recruitment at the Xavier Labour Research Institute (XLRI), Jamshedpur — the first among the premier management institutes to hold placements for the 2003 pass-outs — suggests that India Inc is poised for a turnaround.

“This year over 50 companies participated in the campus recruitment as compared to less than 40 last year. Over 150 offers were made to 124 students of the outgoing batch and 75 per cent of them got placed on Day Zero, the first day of the placement,” a member of the placement committee told The Telegraph here today.

Lateral placements – for students with prior work-experience — took off in a big way as the number of offers soared by 300 per cent. “This marks the beginning of another trend. Today companies want to spend little time in grooming managers and prefer well-rounded professionals on the job from Day One,” he added.

Breaking the tradition of holding placements —the most important event in a B-school’s annual roster — on campus, XLRI organised campus interviews in Calcutta between February 9 and 11. “We didn’t want the Maoist Communist Centre- sponsored 48-hour bandh to disrupt the placement process. So we decided to shift the venue to Calcutta and recruiters cooperated with us,” said another member of the placement committee.

Besides the 25 per cent rise in the number of recruiters queuing up to shop for B-brains, the salaries on offer have also witnessed an upward revision this year. The average salary for the batch of 2003 is Rs 6.82 lakh, about 14 per cent higher than last year. Consulting major McKinsey, with its package of Rs 14 lakh, has reportedly made the “highest-ever” offer in the steel city-based B-school.

The sector-wise break up of the placement results shows that FMCG is still the highest recruiter of the budding managers as 30 students — both from business management and personnel management and industrial relations programmes — signed up for traditional favourites like HLL, ITC, Proctor & Gamble, Coke and Pepsi. The IT sector, which had slipped lower down the list last year, was back with a bang. Technology major like Infosys, Cognizant Technology Solutions, Wipro, Polaris and HCL roped in 27 techies.