Even as the number of female students in the decade-old one year – fulltime residential post-graduate programme for executives (PGPX) at IIM, Ahmedabad, has been steadily rising in the last 4 years, the number of applications for the programme has dipped this year. The PGPX programme received 923 applications for 2016-17, while the number was 1,151 for 2015-16, as per IIMA officials. The programme fee was raised from Rs 21.5 lakh to Rs 24 lakh in 2015 and is currently around 27 lakh. Steep fees and the programme having candidates with average work experience of 8-9 years has made the pool of candidates for the programme very small, says Sunil Sharma, chairperson of PGPX, IIMA. 

Even as the batch size has been increased from 85 to 90 this year, the number of applicants have gone down in the admission process which began last June and ended this March. For the first time, IIMA also conducted two rounds of admissions for the new batch of 90 students at PGPX who started their academic session recently. The number of female students in the batch has been steadily rising from 11 in 2013-14 to 13 in 2014-15 and 16 in 2015-16 and 20 this year, says Sharma. “The one-year MBA programme is a perfect opportunity to get that jump in one’s career profile which is why the programme ranks among the top globally on career growth. The number of women in the batch has been steadily rising from 16 last year to 20 this year. Diversity in the batch has been historically important for IIMA, as we have a case-based pedagogy that thrives on classroom discussions, so that people from different backgrounds bring their own experience to class. However, the dip in applications is not indicative of the interest waning in the programme as the pool of people who have close to nine years of work experience and who have the capacity to pay this money is never going to be very high,” adds Sharma. 

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