Guess who the latest B-school boys in classrooms around town are? Babus from the oldest civic body in the country, no less.

The Calcutta Municipal Corporation (CMC), on mission image makeover, is tying up with a number of management institutes to train civic officials, from executive engineers and managers to sweepers and gardeners.

The back-to-classroom project, being funded by the department for international development of the UK government, will see CMC officials spending time on campuses ranging from the Indian Institute of Management, Joka, to Agri-Horticultural Society, Alipore, to the School of Tropical Medicine, Chittaranjan Avenue, and more.

?About Rs 2 crore will be spent on the Mind-Building Programme to tone up the civic workforce and its attitude towards public service,? said mayor Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharyya.

The first batch of 30 executive engineers and managers has completed a week on the Joka campus, undertaking the short-term refresher course for roughly Rs 14,000 per head.

?The CMC officers were keen and attentive. The feedback we got was that they were happy with the course and its structure,? said Ranjan Ghosh, in-charge of the management development programme at IIM Calcutta.

The CMC batch was put through a gruelling programme involving refresher courses in not just finance, marketing, operations and IT applications, but also behavioural sciences, organisational behaviour and stress management.

?The rationale behind the programme was to orient them with the ideal approach towards providing better support to their consumers, the general public. We tried to focus on local self-governance,? explained Ghosh.

Back at the CMC headquarters, municipal commissioner Alapan Bandyopadhyay was clear that this was the way ahead. ?In the era of globalisation, these training programmes at various institutes will help the civic body emerge as a more citizen-centric and responsive organisation,? he declared.