Bidisha Banerji

Bidisha Banerji

Dr. Bidisha Banerji has her doctoral degree and MPhil in Public Policy and Public Admisnitration from the George Washington University, Washington DC. She has a Masters and Bachelors in Economics from Delhi University. She is the PRME Convener for the India chapter on behalf of IILM.
Learning Rebooted

Learning Rebooted in Higher Management Education

Blog Catgeory, Campus Life, General Blog, IILM Institute for Higher Education, , , , , , ,

By Winnie Ranjan who is a Second Year PGDM Student at IILM Lodhi Road

Higher management education has witnessed a radical transformation in a matter of months due to the COVID 19 pandemic. Technology in the education sector has become an integral part of the new normal. This paradigm shift in the education sector has boosted the overall learning process. As a management student, online learning has made me wonder about the different trends and opportunities evolving in the field of education in the coming years.

As a response to the COVID 19 challenge, colleges and universities have revised the courses and subjects offered to students in order to facilitate learning that aligns with the skills required in the upcoming job market. The digital market space has taken another sharp upward turn and has evolved faster than ever before with new powerful sectors leading the pack. Different fields like data analytics, remote management, digital business, technology advancements among others have created even more demand for jobs. IILM has started offering subjects which foster alignment with the required skill sets in the job market.

In the current business world where everything is heavily dependent on data, analytics has become one of the powerful tools for the success of any organization. Considering this scenario, IILM has started offering different analytics-based courses to its students like Marketing Analytics, HR Analytics, Business Analytics, etc. which are in high demand in today’s job market. We also have a course on Python as technology is rapidly changing and learning programming has become crucial for future managers, so that they can provide innovative solutions for problems in the business world.

The lockdown has highlighted the importance of  E-commerce due to the changing behaviour of the consumers. It is very important for management students to learn about E-Commerce for both job opportunities as well as self-employment. Industry experts are delivering guest lectures so that students can gain insights into the practical application and challenges of e-commerce in various sectors.

IILM revamped its courses based on the current scenario and future forecast. It is also offering a course in Logistics Management. Apart from the digitalization in this industry, there has been a lot of changes in the global logistics management and supply chains due to the disruptions brought by the pandemic. Understanding these interactions is very important for managers to manage inventories and plan ahead.

There has always been a concern with remote learning with respect to imbibing social skills. Management students as “future managers” need to work in teams and manage people effectively. To help students incorporate these skill sets, IILM has offered a course on “Managing Virtual Teams” where international faculty have collaborated with IILM faculty members. This has enabled the mutual benefits of global learning for both students and faculty.

It is very important in these high times to interact and engage with students so that they don’t feel isolated and miss out on the personal touch. Business schools are planning sessions where they engage the students through different fun activities, games and other medium. At IILM, we have an interesting career course on “Management Through Movies” where students participate enthusiastically and discuss different movies keeping in mind the management approach.

The past few months have led to the digitization of education which has given rise to many online education platforms like Coursera, Udemy, Byju, etc., which in turn has widened the scope of learning for both students and professionals. In fact, many business schools have made it compulsory for students to take some courses on these platforms so that they can upscale their existing skills. IILM also took a similar kind of initiative and has tied-up with Coursera for providing free certificate courses to its students. Each student has her own strengths, weaknesses, interest area and pace of learning so based on choosing their own courses from a wide variety offered on this platform has been very helpful in providing personalized learning to students.

Looking into the future:

Looking ahead to a time when colleges and universities would re-open, there are higher chances of integration of analytics and technology into the course curriculum. As management students, it is important that we think through and analyze what is happening around us and how we can create opportunities for ourselves and harness these changes to the best for our learnings for a better future.

To learn more about how the new courses at IILM, please visit us at www.iilm.edu

Government and Public Policy

Blog Catgeory, Faculty, General Blog

 

The debate on the role of government in an era of automation, internet, globalization and climate change has been going on for long. Historically, the government’s chief duty has been to provide security and public services to its citizens while levying taxes and collecting revenues in return. Discussions have been galore on whether governments will be largely redundant in an interlinked world where technology and supra national authorities will become the major players. Paradoxically with the immense growth in technological progress, the regulatory role of the government has come into focus as well as the view that the government should act as a facilitator of advancement.  The Antitrust cases against Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon bring to light this tension between the government as a defender of privacy and rights of its citizens while the claim of these companies is that they have ‘spurred innovations’. With the onset of the corona virus pandemic, the lens through which governmental action can be examined has been further widened.

Covid 19 has resoundingly brought out the importance of health and economic policies to the forefront which have comprehensively demonstrated the importance of government and its public policy. The classic definition of public policy by Thomas Dye aptly fits the current thought process- ‘public policy is whatever governments choose to do or not to do.’ Sweden is an interesting case where the government chose what ‘not to do’ by adopting a comparatively lax approach to enforcing social distancing by legal measures instead it relied on societal norms. Governments may regulate behaviour, organize bureaucracies, distribute benefits or extract taxes- or all of these things at once. The government through its monetary and fiscal policies is often seen stimulating a depressed economy like doling out stimulus packages in India, EU and USA, curbing inflation which may otherwise make food unaffordable to the common wo-man (Refer to the RBI governor’s recent statements which point to this policy goal[1]), giving assistance to those who are unemployed (case of MNREGA) or opening markets for growth and jobs (such as Indian agricultural sector reforms).

Governments are expected to impose lockdowns to curb the spread of an epidemic but also ease into ‘un-lockdown’ when economies start going into recession.  For example, the pandemic response by the New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s government which has been universally praised for its preventive actions and levels of preparedness. Thus, policy-making is an intricate process, shaped and prompted by multitude of factors, actors and their interests. The defining characteristic of this process though is ‘complexity’.

This complex process of public policy making involves primarily the government along with the multitude of government bodies, organizations, lobbies, businesses, contractors and ordinary citizens. It crisscrosses almost every aspect of modern day life- banking and financial transactions, education and healthcare, transportation and infrastructure, trade and foreign policy, social and humanitarian policy, environmental and regulatory policy. One of the immediate and decisive responses of governments in Germany, France, Denmark and Sweden to the covid crisis, for example, has been in providing a direct wage supplement to employers just like wage subsidies on the condition that they not lay off workers Government policies have become absolutely crucial to curbing and coping up with the pandemic but also in solving the ongoing abyss that economies currently find themselves in. In response to the call by businesses and industry leaders for more government action, sweeping interventions and well targeted relief measures, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron have proposed a €500 later €750 billion European Fiscal Response, on top of what countries already planned to do nationally.

Recognizing this growing relevance of public policy, IILM offers a variety of public policy courses as part of its post graduate programs. These courses recognize the complexity of today’s world and the ramifications of public policy on businesses, economy and society. Students can choose from various electives in public policy like political economy, international trade policy, international institutions, foreign policy, environmental policy among others along with lectures and interactions with experts on various facets of public policy making in India. The role of government institutions, stimulus packages, sectoral reforms and defense upgradation cannot be overemphasized in overcoming the challenges that we face today. Governmental policies will largely determine the course ahead in terms of recovery from the pandemic and re-energizing the economy and people.

To know more about public policy response to the COVID 19 pandemic and public policy courses at IILM, please write to me at Bidisha.banerji@iilm.edu

[1] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/policy/with-its-eyes-on-inflation-rbi-may-halt-rate-cuts-for-the-foreseeable-future/articleshow/77666027.cms