This month, each day, except the four Sundays, I will be blogging about interesting features associated with Bengaluru, formerly known as Bangalore, as part of the Blogging from A to Z April Challenge
When one thinks of a course in management studies, it's the reputed federal government-owned IIMs (Indian Institutes of Management) that has multiple campuses in the country that come to mind. But there are many others in the private sector.
One of them is Xavier Institute of Management & Entrepreneurship. Next month on the 28th, it completes 30 years of its inception. From the day when eight founders met at the residence of Bangalore's Archbishop to take the first steps of setting up the institution, it has come a long way.
They started off in a small building measuring 3,000 sqft within the St. Martha's Hospital premises in Bangalore. Now they operate out of 165 thousand sqft campus in Electronics City. The second campus came up in Kinfra Tech Park in Kochi and the third one in Oragadam in Chennai. XIME says they are "the biggest private-sector B-School in South India".
Bengaluru is also a major educational hub. It was the Wadiyar family rulers in the 19th century who introduced Western education which then supplemented the existing schools run by religious leaders. Among the earliest institutions are Bangalore University set up in 1886 and University Visvesvaraya College of Engineering founded in 1917.
An all-India survey conducted by the Union Ministry of Human Resource Development in 2018 said Bengaluru had the most number of colleges in the country, at 893. In 2nd place was Jaipur with 558 colleges.
(Tomorrow, we look at a strange computer glitch that sent Bengaluru into an overdrive)