IIM-A students take consultancy projects for voluntary organisations

He said his work mainly involves collecting data on mitigation,reading up on the topic,and preparing an outline that SEWA can adapt to help train farmers on how to deal with the consequences of global warming.

Among the total 28 projects the students are presently working on,seven involve SEWA while another involves a voluntary organisation based in Bangalore called Quest,which works in the field of enhancing e-literacy among the rural population and the urban poor.

The forum mainly works with major corporations like Mozilla Foundation,Ocwen Financial Corporation,Amazon,Yashraj Films among others,but also accepts projects from start-ups and voluntary organisations. Projects concerning start-ups usually come from those incubated at the Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE) based at IIM-A,while the voluntary organisations either approach the forum or are picked up by them.

“It works both ways. Sometimes students go and identify corporations or start-ups as the case may be,or we are approached,” says Shankar N,a core team member of the forum.

As for the consulting fees,the start-ups and voluntary organisations are charged nominally,mostly just enough to cover costs.

In fact,what the forum is doing is part of a larger trend in many of the IIMs across the country,where students have moved beyond only internships and have started taking projects from corporations so that they are better prepared for the nuances of businesses.

Reddy said,“These projects complement my prior courses. It gives me a hands-on opportunity to do what I learned last semester.”

But there are impediments too,as the students have to squeeze the projects into their already busy on-campus schedules. “The one constraining factor is that it sometimes clashes with our normal studies,” says Shankar N.

The students now work on a rotation basis,with three or four working on a part of it at a time,enabling the others for their on-campus engagements. The forum is now encouraging the teams to do as many consultancy projects as possible.

Shankar adds: “We felt the students were not getting enough exposure in these areas. But they are showing growing interest in this kind of work. That’s why we want to encourage them to take up more of such projects.”