Meet IIM Bangalore’s EPGP Class Of 2025

HANDS-ON LEARNING

What brought the EPGP class to IIM Bangalore last spring? One reason is the wide selection of electives. For one, IIM Bangalore is the only Indian school that is a member of the Global Network of Advanced Management (GNAM). As part of this association, IIMB students can take online courses through 32 top business schools, including the University of Oxford, Yale School of Management, and HEC Paris. The selection is equally robust on campus, adds Abhishek Singh Tomar.

“IIM Bangalore offers the maximum number of electives across any Business school in the country. Unique Electives such as Sports Analytics, Management Paradigms from Bhagavad Gita, and Himalayan Mountain Challenge will help me charter my own learning experience.”

Another differentiator is experiential learning, with hands-on projects embedded throughout the curriculum. Notably, the EPGP program requires student teams to complete The Comprehensive Project, where students gain real world experience in a particular industry. Often times, this is done by partnering with a company to tackle one of their thorniest issues. For Saurabh Samvedi, such experience is invaluable to someone with limited business experience.

“The opportunity to work on a live business project under the mentorship of an IIM Professor was very tantalizing. I have always believed in getting my hands dirty and this was a perfect opportunity to do so before landing up in corporate.”

CAPITALIZING ON NEARBY ASSETS

Another differentiator, says Milan Mitra, is the investments that IIM Bangalore has made to provide the most cutting edge resources to students. Mitra cites the NSRCEL Incubation Center, which supports aspiring founders, and the Financial Laboratory, packed with Bloomberg terminals, as examples of the program’s commitment to staying current with student interests and industry needs. Even more, adds Manan Mittal, the school has tapped into the advantages of its Bangalore setting like few other programs.

“IIM Bangalore sits at the heart of the Silicon Valley of India,” Mittal observes. “The college gets frequent guest lectures from Industry stalwarts, startup founders, political dignitaries and even influencers on extremely diverse topics. The eminent faculty has oceans of knowledge to impart and deep connections in the industry.”

Look no further than some of the past year’s visitors to campus, adds Abhishek Singh Tomar. “We have interacted with industry leaders like Rahm Shastry, Executive Chairman of DriveU; Akhil Sharma, Director of Product RazorPay; and Chris Dickens, Global Head of non-financial risk at HSBC. All these interactions have been instrumental in solidifying our understanding of business.”

BENEFITS OF BANGALORE

Statistically, four-of-every-five Fortune 500 companies has a location in Bangalore. Boasting clusters of tech parks, you’ll find R&D centres for all the big names: Cisco, Boeing, Delta, General Electric, Adobe, Walmart, Google, Microsoft, Rolls Royce, IBM, and Samsung. That translates to expertise, jobs, networks, partnerships, and global access for ambitious graduates. In addition, Bangalore – or Bengaluru – has emerged as startup powerhouse. According to Startup Genome, Bangalore ranks among the world’s Top 10 regions for early stage funding from 2021-2021, attracting $3.8 billion dollars in investments – six times greater than the global average. Over the same period, it has spun out 33 unicorns.

Among the Class of 2025, you won’t find a bigger cheerleader for Bangalore than Bhagyeshwari Chauhan. She touts the region’s “energetic vibe” and prowess in fields like “tech, biotech, finance, [and] retail.” For her, that means students can explore different industries and gain greater versatility, spurring faster personal growth and wider network connections.

“Bengaluru is a melting pot of ideas and people,” Chauhan adds.”Whether I’m having discussions in a café, attending a tech event, or meeting people at a startup meetup, I always feel like I’m in the middle of the action.”

Sidhant Goel is equally bullish on his prospects in the Garden City. “Bangalore’s cosmopolitan atmosphere offers a plethora of opportunities to learn and network outside campus. I particularly like how easy it becomes for IIMB students to work on live projects with close-regular guidance from CXOs of startups and multi-nationals. In my time at IIMB, I have attended multiple talks and workshops on PE/VC by industry stalwarts. These enriching experiences would not have been possible in any other city in the country!”

AN INTERVIEW WITH VANITHA ANAND

This year’s EPGP class features 83 students, with women accounting for 26.5% of the class. The class averaged a 689 GMAT, as scores ranged from 630-780. 11% of the class also submitted a GRE score, which averaged out to 323 and ranged from 316-329. On average, the class is 30 years-old, with 92.77% of the class holding undergraduate degrees in engineering-related fields. That said, as professionals, just 14.46% of the class last worked in engineering. IT Products and Servcies accounted for another 13.25% of the class, followed by Manufacturing and Oil, Energy and Petroleum, each holding 12.05% shares of the class.

In the latest Bloomberg Businessweek ranking, IIM Bangalore ranked as the #3 graduate business program in Asia, while finishing 27th worldwide and 2nd in India according to LinkedIn and the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) respectively. What can the school do for an encore? This summer, P&Q reached out to Vanitha Anand, senior executive in the EPGP Office. Here are her thoughts on the state of IIM Bangalore.

P&Q: What have been the two most important developments in your MBA program over the past year? What type of impact will they have on current and future MBAs?

Anand: “Focused Placement Week: Introduced two years ago, Focused Placement Week concentrates the job placement drive into a single week. During the week, dozens of companies visit the campus and nearly every student is placed.  This initiative has helped our placement team to organize the placement drive better.  The efficiency of the placement process also frees up time for coursework and to pursue non-academic interests.

This initiative has been a resounding success, and it has been refined over the last year.  The institute plans to continue it, benefiting current and future MBAs by providing a streamlined and effective placement process.

On-campus Accommodation for Students: Since last year, we have provided on-campus accommodation, which was previously located outside, to our students. This facility saves students time, which is useful due to the fast-paced nature of the program, allows them to use campus-based resources, and helps them to network better amongst themselves and students of other programs. In addition, they have been able to actively participate in a multitude of cultural events and inter-college festivals such as Eximius and Sangharsh and organize and participate in inter-batch and intra-program sports tournaments.

Although on-campus accommodation is not usually considered to be a necessary component of an MBA program, in the case of our program, it has had a profound impact on the quality of experience for our students in the form of more holistic development.”

P&Q: Every January, P&Q publishes a “10 Business Schools to Watch” feature that highlights how schools are raising the bar and enhancing the student experience through innovation or expansion in programming or resources. What is one innovation that sets your school apart from your peer programs and makes you a business school to watch? Why is it so groundbreaking?

Anand: “A key feature of our MBA program is the emphasis on developing entrepreneurial mindset. The focus is not only on setting up new ventures, but also on the application of entrepreneurial mindset in established organizations. To develop this skillset, the program includes a core course entitled, Entrepreneurial Management. The program also includes several innovative electives. Two examples are Lean Launch Lab and Developing Leadership Networks. In Lean Launch Lab, students learn a process by which they can develop their business ideas through experiments designed in a scientific manner using iterative hypotheses testing. Similarly, in Developing Leadership Networks, students learn methods to analyze the quality of their social networks and strategies to improve their social capital. They also understand the relational aspects of a professional career. In addition, Bangalore, being the center of Indian entrepreneurship ecosystem, permits us to source electives from practitioners working in this space. For example, one elective, Innovative Business Models, is offered by a venture capitalist.

Finally, the NSRCEL (Nadathur S. Raghavan Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning), established in 1997 at IIM Bangalore campus, is the first-of-its-kind not only in India but also in the world. It provides mentorship, incubation support, and access to a vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystem. The Centre runs a campus founders program, where students can get the experience of starting and running a real venture. It is a highly selective program, and it is very popular among the students.

We believe that the depth of our emphasis on entrepreneurial thinking is unique, which sets us apart from peer schools.”

Next Page: Profiles of 12 members of the Class of 2025

© Copyright 2026 Poets & Quants. All rights reserved. This article may not be republished, rewritten or otherwise distributed without written permission. To reprint or license this article or any content from Poets & Quants, please submit your request HERE.