Not all management students in India are as lucky as those of the Indian Institute of Management. If Tamil Nadu produces 50,000 engineering graduates every year, the state does not lag behind in the number of MBAs that graduate every year, either.

Nearly 5,000 students take their MBAs from schools in Tamil Nadu every year; this constitutes 65 per cent of all the MBA graduates in south India.

But what worries the industry is the lack of quality of most of the graduates. Out of the 5,000 MBAs, only 350 landed jobs last year.

The problem is that only a few colleges are selected by the industry for holding campus interviews. Other fresh MBAs become all the more untouchable if they are from the interiors of Tamil Nadu state.

It is against this background that the Confederation of Indian Industry (Tamil Nadu region) came up with a novel idea to bring the industry and students together at one place.

Managemantra is the result.

The top 250 students from 25 management institutes across the state participated in the event. Instead of the industry going to the colleges to interview students, the CII brought the students and the industry together at Managemantra.

These students were tested on their skills, and those who came out with flying colours were interviewed by the industry.

CII had invited representatives from the finance, banking, retailing, information technology and IT enabled services sectors.

Representatives of the RPG Group, HDFC Bank, Bennett Coleman and Company, HR Scope International, Sify, et cetera were at the venue.

The two-day event was aimed mainly at testing the managerial talents of the students. The knowledge partners of the event tested the aptitude, attitude, leadership and presentation skills of the students.

Those who came out tops in the aptitude test and industry exchange fora were grouped into teams of four students each, and they were asked to present business proposals.

After the presentation, the students were grilled by the industry quite mercilessly in the group discussion. Only the strongest and the toughest emerged victorious from the group discussion forum.

Only 20 students from the group of 50 went into the semi-final which constituted 'stress tolerance' test. Only 10 students reached the finals and it was here that each student presented a business proposal, followed by further grilling by the panel on the paper.

Two students from the first batch of MBA from IIT, Madras bagged the first and second prizes and the third prize was won by a student from the famous Loyola Institute of Business Administration, Chennai.

Out of the 67 jobs offered by the corporates, 33 were bagged by the ten finalists. Those who impressed in the earlier rounds were the other winners.

The Vice Chancellor of Anna University E Balagurusamy talked about the need for industry and universities to work together to solve common problems.

He showed keen interest in working with organisations such as the CII so that the students who graduated from the business colleges under the Anna University were 'employable.'

"We are ready to change the syllabus according to your needs," he promised. He confessed that the main problem that the colleges faced was lack of good faculty. "That is why we have set up centres in Trichi, Tirunelveli, Coimbatore and Chennai to train the faculty on new practices and new techniques."

Without doubt, Managemantra can be described as a unique experiment which can be replicated in many other parts of the country too.