WINDS OF CHANGE: The IIM administrative building on the Joka campus. A Telegraph picture

Ajit Balakrishnan took up a gamut of issues — from a shift in syllabus to drawing up a master plan — in the first meeting he presided over as chairman of the board of governors at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Calcutta on Tuesday.

The chairman and CEO of Rediff.com, himself an alumni of the B-school, has succeeded Y.C. Deveshwar to the post.

The most important topic on the agenda was a change in the syllabus of the post-graduate diploma course in management. The discussion focused on the options to be offered to the students and the number of compulsory topics in a term. A panel of faculty members will work out the new syllabus over the next two months.

“We have decided to make changes in the syllabus. The guideline that the faculty council worked on was presented at the meeting. The details will be fleshed out later,” said a member of the institute’s governing body.

The skeletal structure of the syllabus drawn up by the faculty during a three-day brainstorming session last week includes topics that are being taught at the institute and subjects that have become popular abroad.

“We have been working on this and the course structure is going to be revamped. We have invited inputs from the alumni on what the industry is looking for,” said Anindya Sen, the dean (programme initiatives) at IIM Calcutta.

“A master plan and a concept plan for the institute were discussed but the details need to be worked out,” said Shekhar Chowdhury, the director of the institute.

The restructure process started when the IIM Calcutta batch of 1981 met the faculty at a Joka workshop last December. The alumni had stressed the need for the curriculum to be case study-oriented.

Tuesday’s meeting was attended by board members like industrialist Harsh Neotia and Roopen Roy, the managing director of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu India.