Multinational companies in India are turning more and more to local talent to boost their domestic expansion plans.

Nandamudi Sunil Kumar, a student of XLRI's one-year general management programme (GMP 2006-07), has been appointed the chief executive officer of ABN AMRO Foundation in India at an undisclosed salary.

The buzz at the B-school's campus, however, is that he has been offered one of the highest pay packets so far for any B-school student within India.

For any student of any B-school in India, this is the first placement as a CEO.

Sunil Kumar (43) has over 19 years of experience working with National Agricultural Bank for Rural Development (Nabard). At the time of joining the GMP programme in June 2006 at XLRI, Kumar was assistant general manager at Nabard.

Kumar has vast experience in rural infrastructure, corporate planning and micro-finance and possesses the required skills learnt during the MBA programme to manage projects that enhance income generation by providing structure and/or financial capital to enable communities, organisations and institutions to earn a sustainable living.

The interviews, that lasted several rounds, for the post of the CEO at ABN Amro Foundation took place in Mumbai. Kumar's industry knowledge and experience finally tilted the balance in his favour.

The ABN Amro Foundation was set up in December 2005 as part of the bank's commitment to foster sustainable development.

The ABN Amro Foundation is into disbursement of micro-credit (or small loans) in the areas of rural development and conservation of environment and to help school dropouts through rehabilitation and resettlement policies.

The funds are distributed to non-governmental organisations working in these fields after a thorough technical analysis of the project. The Foundation has a corpus of Rs 60 crore (Rs 600 million) for India. In the first year, the disbursement will be to the tune of Rs 28 crore (Rs 280 million).

XLRI's one-year, full-time MBA programme is open to students with more than five years' of managerial experience. XLRI is one of India's premier business schools. Earlier, the one-year programme was open to only students sponsored by the corporates they worked in, but is now open for general students too.

The current batch of GMP at XLRI has 55 students with an average work experience of six years drawn from diverse sectors like finance, marketing, banking, accounting, information technology, education, oil, power, manufacturing, telecom, et cetera.

Besides the Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad, and the Indian School of Business (Hyderabad), XLRI is the only institute that offers a one-year general management programme.