Dr. Sreenivasa Murthy is currently Professor of Finance and Director at IPE. He is also the chairman of the placement division. He holds a master's degree in Commerce from Sri Venkateswara University, a Master's degree in International Business from Pondicherry University, and a Doctorate from the University of Madras. He is a recipient of the UGC Junior Research Fellowship (JRF) for the doctoral program. He has been a merit scholarship holder throughout his academic career and was awarded the National Merit Scholarship twice during that time.

He has around two decades of experience in teaching, research, training, and consulting. He is a visiting faculty member at IIM Kozhikode, IIM Indore, NIT Warangal, IF, JNTU, ANGRAU, and many other universities. He has done consulting assignments for the World Bank, ADB, the Ministry of Rural Development, the Government of India, and many state-level enterprises.

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What motivated you to pursue your career in academia and can you describe briefly about your 30 years of journey with IPE?

Surprisingly, I started my career with IPE. After completing my PhD at the University of Madras with the UGC JRF for the research fellowship, I got an offer from IPE. I joined as an assistant professor on January 3, 1994. So, from that time on, I will have completed 30 years with IPE by next January. Initially, I worked as the program coordinator for the IPE public enterprise program, which is a program for executives; later, I was the coordinator for the PGDM program. I have initiated one program called PGDM in banking, insurance, and financial services. I designed and launched the program. I also worked as the controller of examinations at the institute. And later on, I became the deputy dean and then the director of this in

How would you ensure that college maintains the highest standards and Academic Excellence and Student Success throughout the years consistently?

IPE is an institute that believes in bringing out the best in the students, and we believe in experiential learning. It believes that research is the basis for any decision-making, and we believe in evidence-based inputs. and IPE faculty, because of their experience, training, research, and consultancy, can take their expertise in consultancy as a case study to the classroom. We can provide the best possible inputs to the students, and the pedagogy we follow in the classroom includes discussions, presentations by students, Excel-based exercises, simulations, and article review presentations; all these make the class very interesting. We believe that the students who are completing two years of study with us should have a great learning experience. Obviously, almost 95% of the students are placed, and the remaining five percent always choose family business.

What strategies would you employ to attract and retain talented and diverse faculty members?

IPE was started in 1964 mainly to help public enterprises in terms of training, research, and consulting requirements. IPE provides ample opportunities for faculty to grow. Nowhere in a B school do we have all these four activities: teaching, training, research, and consulting. So when the faculty join here, they become part of the great legacy of IPE. With many years of experience, they're able to mold them through training. In addition to that, the faculty is involved in giving training sessions to the corporations; they interact with the corporate executives, and in that process, they learn all the latest trends and skills. When they advise our consulting organizations, they very closely observe the company, do detailed analysis, and provide insights to the companies. All these involve the intellectual process of arriving at very good conclusions, which would help the industry. All this makes faculty very, very engaged in activities, and they also get all the opportunities. So that they can take these inputs into the classroom in the form of case studies and other experiences. Many people have been here in IPE for more than 20–25 years.

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As a director, What is your main emphasis on, in order to make it stand out and be excelling in all ways possible compared to all the other existing institutions in the nation?

IPE is actually a society established in 1964. It's a nonprofit educational society, and the management believes in giving the best to the students with a secure infrastructure that spreads across a 22-acre campus with all state-of-the-art facilities provided to the students. Which includes sports facilities, an indoor stadium, a basketball ground, and a cricket ground. All these things give the student a great campus experience. Basically, the students are happy with the two important things: academic and non-academic impacts. Academic inputs by our well-trained faculty, and after the classes are over, the students are given ample opportunities to participate in club activities. Students are encouraged to join the club; they start the club. There are more than five clubs for every domain area, like marketing club, finance club, HR club,operations club, and photography club. For every passion or domain area, there is a club, and students join these clubs. They find it a very joyful experience interacting with each other through clubs; they also invite industry people to come and conduct events. This makes them all-rounders.We strongly believe that students who are active on campus will be active in corporate life. So we provide them ample opportunities; the students are encouraged to do events like "Sanskruti". There are so many conferences and workshops to organize; we also involve them in some of our projects, so they get this holistic approach to life.

How do you balance the needs of different stakeholders like including faculty, students, Alumni donors and the community being in the position?

We involve all our stakeholders right from the beginning. We involve alumni in our admission selection process because they want to come back to the college and they want to help us select the right type of students for the next generation. So we involve them in the admissions process. We involve industry people in designing the curriculum. We have something called a Board of Studies, or academic advisory council, for every program. In fact, we have five full-time programs in the institute, all of which are approved by AICTE, and all of these programs are considered equal to an MBA by the Association of Indian Universities. We involve them in designing the curriculum. Not only designing, but the classroom delivery also involves industry people as visiting faculty or guest faculty and being involved in various events, and that will help us get very good placement.

We are in the times where the dynamics of education and industries are rapidly changing. How would you ensure that the appropriate required changes are incorporated into the curriculum of the programs and specializations offered by the institution?

The developments in the various subjects we offer are taken care of through our curriculum update, and we invite industry people to give the latest developments. We have industry meets, so we have conferences or workshops where we invite people to discuss recent developments, so the students will come to know more about the recent developments, and we conduct workshops whenever necessary, in addition to our curriculum. Because it is difficult to cover everything in the curriculum. In fact, we provide the best curriculum. We offer dual specialization to students, and they can choose any two out of eight specializations. Finance, marketing operations, HR systems, business analytics, economics, and entrepreneurship Within these two, in every elective, there will be 10 to 15 subjects from which they can choose any subjects they want. A choice is given to the students. In fact, we have all the electronic databases available, which we are giving free of charge to all the students. So they get complete information about all the companies, their financials, and case studies. Everything is given free of charge to the student. There are free certifications provided to students. Our students have won prizes in the TATA national competition, defeating some of the IIM students, and they have also won the Bloomberg competition. IPE students have proven their intellectual powers in various areas. That is possible because of the various types of facilities provided by the institute for the students, which include not only general classes but also extra workshops.

What is your vision as a director of IPE for the coming years?

We'd like to go to the next level. I would like to offer an exclusive PGDM program in business analytics. That is our immediate goal. Right now we have an intake of 555 students. We are working closely with Collegedunia, and we thank them for their support. So we are able to fill all the seats. All the hostels are full. Already, business and tech specializations are there. But you'd like to offer an exclusive course on data science and business analytics. and we'd like to invite industry people more and more to the campus because many people haven’t seen this beautiful campus. We invite them and provide opportunities for them to interact. We'd like to invite the faculty. We also conduct a lot of faculty development programs across India, going to other institutions. We invite them, and they come here to conduct faculty development programs on recent topics and innovative teaching pedagogy. We are providing consulting support, and our institute is considered a center of excellence by Indian policy research, the Ministry of Education, and the government of India. So we want IIPE to be a household name among publishing enterprises. And through that, we'd like to take advantage. We have been serving the private sector as well. In fact, recently we've been conducting a series of programs for Emerson Labs. We are working for both public and private enterprises at the same time, bringing their experience to the classroom. We've benefited young students, and they get a really great feeling from studying at this institution.