The six IIMs (Indian Institute of Management) are the most aspired for and reputed institutes in India, and so are the courses offered by another dozen or so leading schools. All of them have an excellent track record in offering high quality education, and students from these institutes get the pick of corporate and management jobs directly from campus. The list of B-school in India can go on forever, however, we have tried to limit our classification to the better and more known B-schools. This is how the Indian Council for Market Research (ICMR) and The Human Factor, came up with the annual B-school rankings for 2011. ICMR initially contacted 300 B-schools which were chosen in the first stage from an opinion poll conducted across eight cities in India (Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Bengaluru, Chennai, Pune, Hyderabad and Ahmedabad). The poll was based on the parameters of awareness, recall and perception. ICMR requested these 300 B-schools to share the placement details of students who had been placed in 2010 (that is from the batch of 2008-10).

The focus of this B-school ranking has deliberately been put on the parameter of placements as most management aspirants and students today seem to be giving greater weight to placements than to factors like quality of education. In the second stage, they took up the top thirty B-schools in this list and ranked them further on a uniquely developed placement index. The final ranking of these top 30 B-schools prepared by ICMR is, therefore, based on the Total Placement Activity Index (TPAI), which is an extremely unique index as it takes into consideration total placement efforts of an institute viewed critically in terms of its contribution to employment generation. tpai therefore is the percentage mean weight (that is, average salary multiplied by % batch placed) further multiplied by the batch size. In other words, TPAI is also equal to the average salary package multiplied by the exact number of students placed. For example, a B-school might have just 30 seats and thus may be able to provide an average annual salary of Rs 20 lakh to its students, while another B-school might have 300 students getting Rs 12 lakh average salary. As per our TPAI analysis, the second institute would come out better than the first one, more importantly as its gross contribution is much above the first institution, in terms of both employment generation and overall contribution to the national economy.

For visual consistency, the ranking charts show TPAI results of the top Bschools in a manageable ratio (that is, divided by 100,000), relatively graded of course. The current ranking list includes 29 B-schools (out of which, five B-schools have not been ranked as they categorically refused to share placement data with ICMR, placing a big question on how transparent these five B-schools are). Please read details in the adjacent box about why we have specifically decided to exclude IIPM from the ranking list, despite it coming #1 in the ranking list. Beyond the top 29 B-schools, we have also ranked 94 more B-schools purely on the % mean weight of packages, that is, on average salary multiplied by the % batch placed. These 94 were the ones that transparently shared their placement data with ICMR. Most names featuring among the top B-schools in the current ranking are those that won a spot in the top 30 slots of the Bschool ranking survey 2010 conducted by Business & Economy , a ranking which was based on the weighted scoring of the Bschools by a professional panel of experts and members of the editorial team of Planman Media Pvt. Ltd. . While that survey had focused on various factors that are important for a B-school to be ranked at the top, this survey goes deeper into the singular factor of placements, in other words, TPAI.