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XLRI is all set to increase the PM&IR seats to 120 from the 2009 session:

The ever-increasing demand for its personnel management and industrial relations (PMIR) course has prompted the XLRI School of Business and Human Resource to double the number of seats.

At present, XLRI’s flagship course has room for 60 students, but from the next academic session, beginning June 2009, it will house as many as 120 business enthusiasts.

XLRI director Father E. Abraham said students and representatives of top-notch corporate houses were making a beeline for the PMIR course, which is the oldest and the most prestigious among the institute’s teaching programmes. Though business-oriented, it emphasises on understanding human values.

Abraham said the institute had sought a stamp of approval from the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) on seat increase last year, and it was cleared recently. “Admission was then in the last stage. So, we can only make room for more students from the next academic session,” he said.

Officials said the school was developing infrastructure to make room for 120 students. New faculty members would also be appointed soon.

Interestingly, the XLRI had increased the number of seats in the business management stream in 2005, but the demand for the course has gone up further. Even MNCs are making a beeline to rope in XLRI students. Last year’s recruitment record shows that each student in the PMIR stream had two offers to choose from.

“The demand has exceeded the supply. In fact, we have had to turn down offers from some of the elite recruiters because we had no students to give them,” Jeevan Kumar, secretary of XLRI’s placement committee, said, explaining the reason behind the decision to increase PMIR seats

Actually two honors according to this news report:

 XLRI has bagged the prestigious Dewang Mehta Business School Award 2008 for the “best academic input (syllabus) in human resource”.

In Businessworld on why organizations follow a herd mentality:

A lot of opportunities spring up when a new sector is opened. Many try to exploit this. Since the sector is new, there are no benchmarks. Capability issues arise only later.

The retail sector, for example. More than 95 per cent of the sector is unorganised. The organised players think that even if they capture 5-10 per cent of the unorganised market, it would be great business. But there are too many unknowns. The strategy that worked in other developed markets may not apply in India.

Companies do look for trained HR professionals to handle HR roles. More often than not, if the role is assigned to a non-HR executive, the reason is not because of the quality of HR professionals, but the dearth of HR professionals.

Most companies do try to provide training to non-HR people through job-shadowing, nomination to HR courses and so on when they are given HR roles. In fact, this need has also sprouted some innovative partnerships between industry and academia. For instance, at XLRI we have two such partnerships, one with Accenture and the other with L&T, to conduct long-duration certification courses in HR. I think one of the challenges for the education sector will be to keep pace with the demand for HR professionals, both in terms of quality and quantity.

As a fast-growing economy, the HR exposure that India provides is unthinkable in more mature Western industrial economies. To deliver value in the contemporary scenario, HR managers have to think out-of-the-box and innovate new practices and systems. I think it is this requirement and capability, which differentiates the Indian HR professionals from their Western counterparts.

In more developed economies, HR requirements are comparatively more stable and, correspondingly, the role of HR professionals more process-driven. In comparison, Indian HR professionals have to be innovative and build HR processes around those innovations.

The changes in the demands on HR are not just in knowledge-based industries. HR requirements in the manufacturing sector also are no longer what they used to be. Earlier, the primary task of HR was maintenance of the system because manufacturing companies themselves were stable, showing slow growth or change. What we see now is a spurt of restructuring, mergers, international forays through expansion and acquisitions and upgrading of technology in the manufacturing sector. In addition, there is a migration of talent from manufacturing to the service/ knowledge sector, just when the sector requires them.

even at a very conservative estimate we are looking at least 5 million new jobs in the next five years. And a quick calculation would show that even if we need one HR professional for 1,000 employees (which by itself is a pathetic ratio), one needs at least 5,000 new HR professionals.

On the supply-side, the situation is far from comfortable. Among the few educational institutes that provide specialised HR courses — XLRI, TISS, SCMHRD, MDI — the total number of students do not add to more than 250-300 per annum, and many of them join HR consultancies rather than industry.

This is one big gap which the HR fraternity, in industry and academia, should be worried about. I don’t think it will be feasible for educational institutions to suddenly scale up their numbers to meet this demand.

From the XLRI News blog. It's also got featured in the University Network for Social Entrepreneurship:

Xavier Labour Relations Institute (XLRI), Jamshedpur is introducing a new elective on Social Entrepreneurship for its second-year Personnel Management and Industrial Relations (PMIR) and Business Management (BM) students in September.

You can download the course outline here (140 KB MS-Word File)