JP Morgan, which hired 350 students from Indian campuses last year is making initiatives to create more industry-academia linkages with colleges in India at the under-graduate, graduate and post-graduate levels in the country.

As a first step, the company has sponsored a Bloomberg news terminal at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad.

This is the first time the company has sponsored a news terminal for any institute. The terminal will provide real time and historical data for about five million securities covering equities, bonds, currencies, derivatives and commodities from around the world to help students prepare term papers, assignments and project courses. 

Larry O'Donnell, head human resources-India for JP Morgan said that this was part of the company's endeavour to create a partnership early and not just during recruitment.

The company has hired students from the IIMs at Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Calcutta and other top institutes like XLRI-Jamshedpur last year and is looking at sponsoring lecture series, internship programmes and other activities for institutes in India.

Bakul Dholakia, director, IIM-Ahmedabad said that the terminal would enable the institute to design new courses and update old courses.

He said that for a career in financial markets one needs a lot of effort to keep information at the cutting edge for which a terminal would help students who want to specialise in the finance area.

He also spoke of the institute's efforts to tie up with another major software company for a similar online real time trading experience in 1998-99 which did not fall through.