Is 'Brand Anna' the New Elective?

By SiliconIndia   |   Tuesday, 06 September, 2011
Print
Email


Bangalore: Anna Hazare's magic seems to be captivating management students too. 'Brand Anna' is the new interest of management students in various colleges of India. The Indian Institute of Management, Indore (IIM-I) has included Corruption as a new elective as they are seeing a rising interest in the issue as a research subject. The IIM will modify the elective and include the Anna Hazare movement in the context of the Lokpal.

Other than IIM, The Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad (MICA) and the Faculty of Management Studies (FMS), Delhi is also seeing proposals from students who want to focus on the issue as part of their course work. The students of FMS will have a class on “Brand Anna” where they will deliberate on the phenomenon.

Students at Delhi University’s FMS took part in a three hour session on Tuesday to discuss brand Anna wherein he was projected as a new product in the market and how he has managed to dent the image of existing market players (the Congress party). The students off IIM Indore also carried out a survey across six IIMs on graft, the Lokpal Bill and the government’s reaction. And of the virtually 600 students, about eighty one percent did not like the government’s version of the five percent who supported it. No less than sixty one percent of the students backed the Jan Lokpal Bill and seventeen percent opposed it while the others had not read the Bill.

With the trend of electing corruption studies on a rage, there is a possibility of many institutes offering the elective along with the IIM-I and Mudra Institute. Universities offering corruption studies overseas include the Australian National University and the Portsmouth University in United Kingdom. The Australian university offers Post Graduate programme in Corruption and Anti-Corruption Studies and the Portsmouth University offers an M.Sc in Counter Fraud and Corruption Studies.
Write your comment now