IIM Ahmedabad gives back to the society with 10 EWS seats

The Ministry of Human Resource and Development last year, in its push for social welfare, released guidelines that require IIMs to allocate 10% seats for students from economically weaker sections. In line with the guidelines, IIM Ahmedabad has introduced 10 seats for EWS from the academic year 2020-21.

The officials of the B-School stated that IIM Ahmedabad had already thought of gradually increasing the number of seats in the EWS quota to reach the 10% mark, corresponding to its infrastructure. This year, IIM-A’s admission process for the flagship PGP MBA course will reflect these changes, adding 10 seats respectively. 

As disclosed by the officials at IIM-A, the institute sent 430 admission letters to students, noting that this academic year’s batch size would be 395. Also, the officials are yet to analyse the number of aspirants who made it to the prestigious B-School from Gujarat.

Following last year’s pattern, engineering students dominated the batch this year as well. Out of the many who successfully paved their way to IIM Ahmedabad, 79% of students had an engineering background. On similar lines, the gender ratio at the coveted B-School did not witness a drastic change either. Women constituted 23% of the total selected candidates. In addition, it has been noted that the average work experience of the students selected is 22 months. 

The chairperson of admissions at IIM-A, Prof. Vishal Gupta, stated that admission letters were sent to 430 students for IIM-A’s PGP course and another 47 were sent for PGP-FABM. 

The officials also said that the admission process at IIM Ahmedabad largely remained unaffected due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Following last year's steps, the selections made this year too were based on the candidate scores in CAT 2019, their application rating (including the performance of students in classes 10, 12 and their Bachelor’s degree), analytical writing tests and personal interviews. All interviews for the admission process of IIM-A were conducted face to face, before the lockdown was enforced.

All IIMs are expected to release their shortlists within the second week of May 2020. IIM Kozhikode was the first to release it's shortlist followed by IIM Bangalore and IIM Ahmedabad.