Moving ahead from just having visiting faculty on its campus, B-schools are now working towards having international faculty on their rolls.

The Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A), for instance, is toying with the idea of having international faculty on its rolls. The institute is in talks with a French professor to join it full time and conduct classes.

Many B-schools in India have international faculty visiting its campuses on an ongoing basis. However, an attempt to have them on the campus as resident faculty is a new experiment by an Indian B-school.

"We want to raise our international portfolio and international research. We are casting our net wider and actively looking for international faculty for the same. We will take good people wherever we find them," reasons Professor Arvind Sahay, IIM Ahmedabad.

Over the next three years, IIM-A plans to increase its faculty strength from 83 to 100. For the PGPX programme (one-year management programme), the institute has five visiting faculty and for the PGP programme (two-year post graduate programme in business management) it has three visiting faculty.

Another prominent B-school which has a good number of visiting faculty on the campus is the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad. The school has a portfolio faculty model where it has a mix of resident and international visiting faculty.

The resident to international visiting faculty ratio at the institute currently is 25:75 which the institute plans to raise to 50:50. Over the next two years, the institute plans to increase its strength from 200 students to 550 students and thus would be recruting more faculty members.

For the IIMs, however, recruiting and retaining an international faculty is a challenging affair. "Though we always welcome visiting faculty, we find that they do not want to stay on a permanent basis on the campus. However, NRI faculty who have been working with universities abroad, do show interest in joining us," says Professor Anindya Sen from IIM Calcutta. At IIM Calcutta, two new NRI professors have joined the institute recently from the UK.

A major hindrance in attracting an international faculty for the IIMs is salary structure of the faculty members. At any IIM, an assistant professor's monthly income is anywhere between Rs 35,000-40,000 (varies due to the consultancy fee one generates from corporate assignments). An associate professor's monthly income is between Rs 40,000-45,000 and a professor's income is around Rs 54,000.

A professor in the US, however, draws anywhere between $4,000 (around Rs 1.8 lakh) to $5,800 (around Rs 2.61lakh) per month. This income is over and above the consultancy fee he would generate from corporate assignments.

"A good salary structure helps the professors to devote much more time to teaching and research. Unlike in India, they need not take up consultancy assignments to earn an extra buck," says an IIM Calcutta professor.

In B-schools each functional area has an electronic and personal network which facilitates the institute when it is searching to recruit a professor. In a typical recruitment of an international faculty, the candidate comes to the college and presents paper in his/her research area.

Generally, domestic fare, local airfare and hospitality is taken care of by the host insitute. However, IIM-A is exploring means to facilitate such interviews by making it happen through video-conferencing.