THE world of business education and thinking has been largely American terrain over the last hundred years. American thinkers — from Frederick Taylor with his stopwatch at the beginning of the 20th century to the modern generation of gurus — have monopolised business wisdom.

Now change is in the air. A new generation of thinkers is emerging from India. Superstars include C. K. Prahalad, co-author of Competing for the Future; Ram Charan, itinerant executive coach; Amartya Sen, Nobel Prize winner for economics; and Vijay Govindarajan, professor of international business at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business.

Business education is flourishing in India. The Association of MBAs accredited its first MBA programme in India earlier this year. The Management Development Institute, in Gurgaon, offers one of more than 1,000 home-grown MBA courses in the country.

Among them is the Indian School of Business (ISB) in Hyderabad, which has a one-year MBA and, of which, Don Jacobs, dean emeritus of the Kellogg School, Chicago, has said: “It’s unlikely that we will see more than one other business school of the scale of the ISB launched in our lifetime.”

The roots of business education in India are longer established than might be assumed. The Indian Institute of Management Ahmedaba (IIMA) was set up in 1961 with support from the Harvard Business School faculty. But it is only now, with a reservoir of potential faculty, a fast-moving business sector and growing power in the world economy, that Indian business schools are coming of age.

As verification of this Harvard inaugurated its India Research Centre in March. The logic behind the world’s premier business school taking a greater interest in India was explained by Jay Light, dean of Harvard: “To understand the global economy you need to understand what’s happening in Bombay as well as New York, London and Tokyo.”

Many European business schools rely on Indian and Chinese students to make up their MBA numbers. Last year, for the first time, the biggest national contingent at Insead, France’s business school, was Indian. At IMD, the Swiss school, the number of Indians on its MBA programme had risen 133 per cent since 2001.

And it’s not just students. Govindarajan says: “I remember when I got my job at Tuck 20 years ago I was the first Indian faculty member. Now it’s not unusual to see 20 per cent of faculty with Indian roots and connection.”

In the short term the flow of Indian students out of the country is unlikely to dry up. International experience is still a valuable commodity and establishing credible business school brands takes time.

Malcolm Kirkup is the director of Lancaster University Management School’s full-time MBA programme, which attracted 20 per cent of its current cohort from India. He reports a big increase in engineering and IT graduates to the UK’s MBA market, attracted by the Government’s highly skilled migrant programme.

Chris Jeffery, director of the executive MBA programme at Cass Business School, says: “Although lots of home-grown programmes are springing up, there is still a demand by Indian students looking to study on a well-rounded, broad and international programme that will expose them to global networks.”

Some European schools are seeking to bridge the gap by striking alliances with Indian schools. ESSEC-Paris and the IIMA signed a strategic partnership in February.

Oxford’s Said Business School now has an Oxford India Business Network and a centre of expertise on Indian business is planned there.