University from Wardha to offer MBA course in Hindi

A university in Wardha in Maharashtra will soon be starting an MBA course. While looking at the increasing demand for MBA graduates, this comes as no news.

The only difference here would be the medium of instruction and the course content — it would all be in Hindi. It is probably the first of its kind, designed for students who wish to opt for a Hindi MBA.

The Mahatma Gandhi Antarrashtriya Hindi Vishwavidyalaya in Wardha will be offering the course from the next academic year starting from July 2008. As the vice-chancellor G Gopinathan says, “It is a commercial language now, why miss it?” University authorities believe that management and technology cannot be restricted to a particular language.

Gopinathan said, “It is the bazaar and business language and it needs to be experimented. Though we have not devised the entire curriculum in Hindi, we will do it as soon as the course starts. We did not wish to delay the launch because of the nitty-gritty.”

Currently, the university will use translated versions of books written by different authors in English. The board of studies’ committee from the university has already had several meetings to discuss various topics that have to be incorporated.

The MBA (Hindi) will be offered in rural, tourism and finance managements to begin with and later offer other specialised courses. The university is planning to release the advertisements by the end of this month.

A university in Hyderabad had earlier offered the course in Urdu (just the medium of instruction) and surprisingly managed to get 100 per cent placements for their MBA graduates, said the vice-chancellor.

DNA spoke to a couple of corporates to check out the placement value of Hindi MBA graduates. Kishore Biyani, the MD of Pantaloon Retail, said, “It is always good to learn in your basic language. The understanding of concepts will be better. If the curriculum is in par with the MBA (English), then we will not have a problem in recruiting such candidates.”

Charudatta Deshpande, head of corporate communications, ICICI, said, “There is no sacrosanct policy on knowing English in the finance industry. The person has to deal with numbers. If the concepts are clear, we will not have a problem in recruiting. In fact, it will be an added advantage for us to recruit front office candidates with an MBA in the local language.”

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