After a lull of nearly two years, the Indian Institutes of Technology are smiling again with pre-placement offers pouring in.
The IITs will begin their placements in December but companies which had not issued pre-placement offers earlier, have queued up and overall, the response is very good.
At IIT-Bombay, more than 100 companies have already confirmed that they would recruit campus graduates and many more have expressed their desire to be on campus and participate in the process.
About 20 students have received PPOs following successful summer internships in the companies. Many more are expecting to get offers.
"We are confident of more than 200 companies preferred by students, to recruit from the campus. We are currently having openings for jobs in Japan, UK, Taiwan, Malaysia, UAE and the US among others.
"Many other multinational firms will be recruiting our students for positions in their India offices, but these students are often rerouted to international assignments soon after their first year," said the IIT Bombay placement office in an emailed statement.
The institute said other than the core job offers relevant to each of the engineering disciplines, it has received good response from the finance, consulting, FMCG, analytics, IT and software, public sector units and research and development sectors.
The quality and number of responses from each of these sectors have seen a steady growth over the years and none of them can be called 'dominant'.
At IIT Kharagpur, the improved pre-placement scenario has translated into 13 PPOs by Barclays Bank, apart from offers by Singapore-based Deutsche Bank, among others.
In fact, Deutsche Bank has come up with a salary package that is higher than last year's best (Rs 22 lakh or Rs 2.2 million) to one of the candidates.
"One of the offers made by Barclays Bank is higher than last year's highest salary, however, we will not be able to disclose the exact amount as of now.
"And since the PPOs will continue to pour in, we expect better offers in the coming days. The response from companies, especially from the core engineering sectors and banking &
"Things are definitely looking brighter than last year," said Sunil Srivastava, head of training and placement, IIT Kharagpur.
While last year around 160 firms were present in the campus for pre-placement talks, this year, the institute expects the numbers to rise to close to 200.
IIT Delhi, on the other hand, said it is not too keen on pre-placement offers.
"PPOs are not important for us. They are more important for B-schools, while we prefer to focus on final placements.
"Nevertheless, 15-20 pre-placement offers have been made by companies from the core engineering and IT sectors.
"Since the economic slowdown is almost over, the offers will definitely be higher than what was seen in previous years," said Kushal Sen, head of training and placement, IIT Delhi.
The improved scenario for PPOs is significant because IITs and other higher education institutions had hit a low in placement offers during the global financial in the last couple of years.
So much so, that while students at some of the IITs had received regret letters from companies, a few major banking and finance recruiters did not participate in the placements, resulting in a dip in salary offers.
The 2008-09 academic year witnessed several leading firms expressing their regret for not being able to participate in the placement process at IIT Roorkee.
Moreover, 15 students of IIT Kharagpur had received regret letters where US-based information technology companies -- Montolova, Magma Design Automation and Paradigm -- had said that they were unable to absorb the students due to 'internal restructuring plans'.
While in 2008, 3,031 students from seven IITs were recruited by MNCs through campus placements, in 2009 the number had dipped to 1,606.
