When Saurabh Singh, 23, a chartered accountant from Calcutta, enrolled into the Indian Institute of Management (Bangalore) two years ago for his masters in business administration or MBA, he never thought that he would land a 100,000-pound-per-annum job in Britain. (1 pound = Rs 68.39). Most of Singh's classmates did not fare badly either. The average salary the Batch of 2000 picked up was as high as Rs 1 million per annum.

This year's placements have just concluded at India's premier chain of management colleges, the Indian Institutes of Management. And the jobs seem to be getting substantially better every year. Companies vied with one another to approach the students with dream job offers. This year, in IIM-B alone, about 40 students got foreign job offers with compensation in foreign currency.

Gone are the days when 'bright' engineering students from the Indian Institutes of Technology would enroll at the IIMs and then fly off to an American management college, and from there to coveted management jobs in the US. These days, all they have to do is select a job in the cool comfort of their college environs. Global-scale companies vie for them at annual campus placements at IIMs.

Interestingly, placements in IIM-B were not cent per cent this year, for an excitingly different reason. One student, Vivek Kedia, aged 21, who did his undergraduate course in commerce at Delhi University and specialised in finance and systems at IIM, opted out of the placement market, and decided to be an entrepreneur instead. He is to launch his own dot-com company from Bangalore in another fortnight from now. He becomes the first user of the IIM-B's Rs 100 million business incubator.

Companies from all over the world line up outside the IIM gates months before the recruitment week. Campus placements too are getting completed in less and less time. In Bangalore, placements this year were over in just two days, as against four days last year. At Lucknow, they were over even faster, by the afternoon of the second day.

(Only three IIMs -- Bangalore, Calcutta and Lucknow -- responded to rediff.com's repeated requests for interviews and information about their placements this year. The other three at Ahmedabad, Kozhikode and Indore appeared not to have collated their data yet, and had not answered the questions or agreed to talk.)

And it is not just that the job market is good right now, insist the staff and students of the IIMs. The students are getting better every year. "The market situation is definitely good and that helps, but our ability to consistently outperform the market is a tribute to the students of the IIMs," says Leena Chatterjee, chairperson of the IIM-C's placement committee. Adds placement representative Saurabh Upadhyay of the IIM-B : "Even the summer jobs are getting better now, with many of our students picking up short-term overseas assignments at dollar salaries."

That is not all. "Global placement was the distinguishing theme for this year's placements," says Praveen Kumar Choudhary, external relations secretary of the IIM-C. "An increasing number (70) of global offers were made by esteemed international names like Lehman Brothers, MMG, Boston Consulting Group, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, JP Morgan, Exeter Group, Deutsche Bank Global Markets to our students. The fact that one in every three students got at least one global offer confirms the recognition being increasingly accorded to our institutes of management by the world business community. An average global salary of US $83,000, with six offers of US $130,000, places IIM-Calcutta in league with the leading business schools of the world."

The other IIMs are not far behind. And they show a quantum leap over last year's results. Here are the salary statistics of this year's placements at IIM-Lucknow, at which the average salary per student this year was over Rs 700,000 per annum, as against Rs 450,000 per annum last year.

• Highest salary offered by a foreign company : $ 65,500 (same as last year).
• Number of offers for foreign placement : 15 (as against six last year)
• Maximum salary offered for Indian placement : Rs 900,000 (Rs 560,000 last year).
• Minimum salary offered: Rs 320,000 (Rs 180,000 last year).
• Average Indian salary: Rs 550,000 (Rs 376,000 last year).