IIM Raipur Students Interact with Core Industries at National Expo - 3

The students of Indian Institute of Management Raipur had interactions aimed at knowledge-exchange with the entrepreneurs and representatives of the micro, small scale and medium scale enterprises (MSMEs) who participated in the National Expo 3. The expo was organized at Science College Ground in Raipur under the banner of Indore Infoline Pvt. Ltd. from 16^th December to 18^th December, 2011.

National Expo 3 is the largest industry exhibition in central India. Almost 200 companies from core sectors like steel, power, cement, mining, infrastructure, construction and automation participated in the event. The list includes Siemens Ltd., Wendt (India) Ltd., Doshion Ltd., Atlas Copco India Ltd. and many small scale and medium scale enterprises. Moreover, some foreign companies, mainly from China and Singapore, were also present. This exhibition provided them an opportunity to display their products and technology and to interact with potential customers. It also proved to be a very useful platform for some budding companies and new products as they got significant exposure.

The students of IIM Raipur took up this opportunity and attended the National Expo 3 with the sole intention of learning through interactions with the local industries. Chhattisgarh is well known for its Core Industries and we experienced it first-hand while talking to the representatives of the various start-ups who also were participating. Many of the students have some prior experience in the core sectors like steel, power, mining, construction etc. This further added to the quality and fruitfulness of the interactions as they could easily connect with the industry representatives and understand their problems and practices. We learnt about their technology, logistics, markets, competition and management practices. They also shared with us the problems that they confront while setting up or expanding business in Chhattisgarh as well as those that come up in day-to-day operations. The discussions then went on towards the possible solutions, where we tried to complement their experience with our classroom learning. Finally, we talked about the likely future scenario of industries in Chhattisgarh, and found that almost everyone seemed quite optimistic. We also explored opportunities for making the Expo a bigger success by researching into dimensions like Logistics, Layout, Customer Satisfaction, Branding etc.

In a nutshell, the National Expo 3 proved to be a great learning experience for IIM Raipur students and we look forward to participate in and contribute to such events in the future.

The writer of this article, Abhay Shankar is a PGP student of Indian Institute of Management, Raipur and has done his B. Tech (Chemical Engineering) from BIT Sindri. Prior to joining IIM Raipur, Abhay was working at Vedanta Aluminium Ltd. Abhay can be reached at pgp11001.abhay@iimraipur.ac.in