Management institutes are wholesome entities in themselves. Generally. Management institutes (or I should rather call them departments) in the North Campus of The Delhi University are pretty much the best bargain you will find between a conventional management institute and a University set-up with Management studies as just another department.
Colleges offering management education in DU are Faculty of Management Studies or FMS and Masters in International Business (MIB) and Masters in Human Resources and Organizational Development (MHROD) in Delhi School of Economics (DSE). Both of these institutes are situated within 100 meters of each other and thus are easily accessible to students from both the sides. Individually both of them are small; just enough to accommodate the essentials of a management institute. However, if you look around, they have on their disposal a whole plethora of resources from around the university which makes them one of the richest institutes in the management bracket in terms of the resources they offer.
Apart from their individual libraries, the institutes have access to the famous Ratan Tata Library of the Delhi University (commonly known as RTL by the students) Delhi University situated in the DSE which has a range of around 14 lakh books and a collection of rare dissertations and journals, copies of which are not available in any other library in India. The students, thus, have a vast collection of books to reference from as they are not limited to the libraries in their institutes.
Students at FMS, MIB and MHROD of DSE are not restricted to the courses offered by their own colleges but can take up different interdisciplinary courses anywhere across the University according to their interest and availability of time. The courses details are floated on the university website and/or are sent to the coordinators at the institutes for the interested students to register; during my visit, the students at FMS were taking up the foreign language course at St. Stephens college.
Its just not the courses and the library that the students have a free access to. Being a part of DU, which has around 80 colleges under it, the options for infrastructure are immense. Auditoriums, grounds, swimming pools etc from colleges across the university are also available to the students. Sometimes the students might have to get written permission from the institute heads for the use of the resources, which is not difficult to obtain and does not hinder the students from using any of the facilities available.
The biggest advantage of such a set up is the number of different students one gets to interact with. With a constant presence of many different students from all across the country in and around the campus, students are able to obtain view points of all sorts of people around, helping in developing managers with sound decision making capabilities.
And of course how can we forget food? There are as many canteens as there are colleges and sure enough there are no restrictions in eating at any of them. The prices are cheap and the food is delicious. Along with that you will get a healthy dose of interesting debates on all current topics in the country. I attended one on “One should be aware of his identity, not ashamed of it” at the North Campus canteen. Needless to say, the views were fascinating.
A definite cue for us to focus towards building more universitiy set ups than specialized institutes.