Abstract
Sustainability issues, given their potential scale of impact and urgency, have captured the imagination of both corporations and academic institutions everywhere. This paper examines how such problems and their potential solutions have been incorporated into higher education, particularly business school education in India. With over 3,600 business schools in the public and private sector, business education in India has proliferated. However, students by and large still remain unexposed to sustainability and disaster management concepts in their curriculum. The underlying factors for this include, lack of institutional capacity, issues related to faculty motivation and incentives, lack of recruiter interest and limited availability to high quality resource material. Further, while several schools in India focus on sectors relevant to sustainability, inter-organizational linkages have not developed and business school generally operate independently. This paper examines the way forward to deeply integrate sustainability principles into the core curriculum of business schools. Measures suggested include creating communities of practice among academia and industry, building a resource base of teaching materials for easy access by faculty, and several measures to strengthen institutional capacity.
Highlights
Sustainability issues, especially with respect to environmental management, and especially disaster management, are increasingly influencing both boardroom strategies and corporate profits
While corporations have responded to broad sustainability concerns even earlier, the last two decades have seen a significant increase in the level as well as the scope of businesses’ engagement with sustainability matters
While industrial sustainability has been intensively discussed in the developed country contexts, in the context of the developing countries these may differ in terms of methods as well as outcomes
Summary
Sustainability issues, especially with respect to environmental management, and especially disaster management, are increasingly influencing both boardroom strategies and corporate profits. Business education in India is organized at three levels; the first, namely premier schools such as the Indian Institutes of Management, are set up through a special act of the Indian parliament offering both two-year and one-year Post Graduate Diplomas in Management. A second approach being adopted by a few schools is to introduce compulsory core courses as a part of the first year core curriculum as in the case of schools like IIM Ahmedabad, Xavier School of Management Jamshedpur, Xavier Institute of Management Bhubaneshwar, IIM Lucknow and others. In many of these instances multiple courses on environment are offered. Most of these programmes have remained small and have not been scaled up
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