One of the premiered institutions for engineering, BITS Pilani, introduced a management school named BITS School of Management (BITSoM) on Thursday. The institute has 120 vacancies. Students who crack exams like CAT, GMAT, GRE can secure admission.
The school offers two-year degree courses including modern courses like entrepreneurship and innovation, e-commerce and digital leadership, finance and skill-specific programmes with data science, design thinking, etc.
How the BITS School of Management is set up
The flagship offering is a two-year, full-time residential MBA that the school describes as more than 60 courses and 1,350 contact hours, built around three live projects with organisations, a mentorship scheme and a personal development programme for each student, according to the programme’s own outline. Students choose from six specialisations: entrepreneurship and innovation, finance and investing, e-commerce and digital leadership, leadership and strategy, marketing and consumer insights, and operations and supply chain management, with design thinking and data science threaded through the curriculum.
The academic year is structured around a pre-term in May and June, three teaching terms in each year, an eight-week summer internship between the two years and final placements in January of the second year, with convocation the following April. Recruitment starts early: summer internship placements begin in November of the first year, two months before the final placement season opens for the senior class. The degree itself is awarded by BITS Pilani, which holds Institution of Eminence status as a deemed to be university, so the business school’s graduates receive a BITS Pilani MBA rather than a diploma.
Alongside the specialisations, the BITS School of Management lists a set of shorter courses it groups as workplace essentials, leadership skills and contextual perspectives, and the school says artificial intelligence is now integrated across the curriculum. A dual degree option is also on offer for students who want to pair the MBA with a second qualification.
BITS Pilani plans to set up the school in Mumbai with an estimated budget of Rs 1500 crore. For the time being, the school will operate from BITS Powai campus.
The institute assured to nominate faculty from top business schools across the world. It will include professors from leading B-schools like NYU Stern School of Business, Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Singapore Management University and Kellogg School of Management. It also claims to involve well-known industry practitioners.
The institution behind it
The BITS School of Management is the fifth campus of BITS Pilani, an institution whose own account of its history runs from a pathshala founded in 1901 through its incorporation as a college in 1947 to deemed university status in 1964. The group’s existing campuses at Pilani, Goa, Hyderabad and Dubai are dominated by engineering and the sciences, which makes the management school its first stand-alone venture outside that core, and the choice of Mumbai places it in the city with the deepest recruiter base in Indian business education.
The project is chaired at governing council level by Kumar Mangalam Birla, the BITS Pilani chancellor, according to Business Today, and the institute’s own literature presents the Mumbai school as the heir to an entrepreneurial culture it says has been built over six decades.
For applicants in 2021 the pitch was an unusual one: a first cohort admitted on a combination of CAT, GMAT or GRE scores and interviews, at a school with no alumni, no placement record and a campus borrowed from its parent in Powai. The wager was on the BITS Pilani name, the imported faculty and the promise of the Mumbai build to come.
In the words of the Dean Dr Ranjan Banerjee, the eligibility criteria will not depend solely on the entrance test or the academic qualifications. He added that the institute plans to develop a diverse campus with students from every background (engineering or non-engineering).
The BIT School of Management is an initiative which focuses on training inventive and individualistic thinkers to help them accept and transform the world.
Since then: a campus near Kalyan and a bigger intake
The first cohort was admitted within months, with classes planned from July 2021 subject to pandemic conditions, and the school moved quickly to add an international layer. In May 2021 it announced a partnership with London Business School, the alma mater of Birla, under which BITSoM students can take a two-week immersion at the London campus, including an entrepreneurial project lab where they work in small teams with entrepreneurs, Business Today reported. London Business School faculty were also to teach at the Mumbai school, and the two institutions agreed to develop an executive programme for women leaders in India. Birla said the immersion would “deepen students’ understanding of cross-cultural leadership.”
The promised Mumbai home has materialised as well. The BITS School of Management now operates from the BITS Pilani Mumbai campus on Kalyan-Murbad Road in Thane district, the permanent site the institute was still planning when the school was announced. Admissions for the 2026 intake, the sixth cohort of the flagship MBA, opened in September 2025 with 240 seats, up from 160, the school said in its admissions announcement, with the first application round closing on 16 November 2025 and the programme starting in June 2026. The larger intake makes the sixth cohort twice as large as the founding class announced five years earlier, a scale the school reached without moving away from its original three-examination admissions route.
The dean’s office has passed from Ranjan Banerjee to Dr Saravanan Kesavan, a professor of operations, and the school’s listed recruiters now span banking, consulting and consumer goods, including JP Morgan, HDFC Bank, Flipkart, Accenture and Hindustan Unilever, according to its website. The faculty model remains the mix promised at launch, permanent staff alongside adjuncts drawn from schools such as Kellogg, Wharton, NYU Stern, MIT Sloan and Cornell, and admission continues to run through CAT, GMAT and GRE scores rather than a single gateway examination.
