Version 1: All 475 MBA students at Indian Institute of Management Calcutta land paid internships

The average stipend hit a record Rs 1.93 lakh a month, and consulting firms made four in every ten of the 546 offers.

Picture this. A student who has not even finished an MBA yet will be paid Rs 2 lakh for one month of summer work. At the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, that is not the top of the batch. That is the middle.

On Tuesday, 27 October 2026, the institute said all 475 students in its MBA batch had found summer internships. Together they got 546 offers, made by 156 companies. The average monthly stipend reached Rs 1.93 lakh, the highest the institute has ever recorded.

First, what is a summer internship?

An internship is a short spell of real work at a company while you are still studying. Think of it like a trial net session before a cricket team picks its squad. The company watches how you play. You find out if you like the team.

MBA stands for Master of Business Administration. Here it is a two year course, and these 475 students are the 63rd batch of it. A stipend is the money a company pays an intern. It is a bit like pocket money, except that the money is earned.

An offer is a company saying "come work with us this summer". There were 546 offers for 475 students, so some students got more than one.

Companies visit the campus in rounds, which the institute calls clusters. This year the season wrapped up early, in Cluster 3. The first round, Cluster 1, gave out more offers than in any year since this round system began, according to the institute.

How much money are we talking about?

The average stipend was Rs 1.93 lakh a month. The median was Rs 2 lakh a month, the institute said.

These two words mean different things. For the average, you add up every student's stipend and divide by the number of students. For the median, you line up all the students from lowest stipend to highest and pick the one standing in the middle. So half the batch got Rs 2 lakh a month or more.

A counter rising to Rs 1.93 lakh, the average monthly stipend — The average monthly stipend this year was Rs 1.93 lakh, a record for the institute.

Last year the average was lower. The previous batch, the 62nd, had 470 students who got 510 offers from 183 recruiters, ET reported at the time. Its median was also Rs 2 lakh a month.

Look closely at those numbers. This year, fewer companies took part, 156 against 183. Yet they made more offers, 546 against 510. On average, each company made more offers than before.

Two panels: 510 offers for 470 students last year, 546 offers for 475 students this year — More offers this year, even though fewer companies took part.

Why consulting firms hire the most

Consulting firms made 220 offers. That is 40.29% of all offers, or about four in every ten, ET reported. The names included Bain & Company, Boston Consulting Group, Kearney, Roland Berger, Accenture Strategy and Alvarez & Marsal.

So what does a consulting firm do? Other companies pay it to solve their problems. Imagine a samosa stall owner who sells fewer samosas every month. A consultant would study the prices, the timing, the location and the menu, and then suggest what to change. Big consulting firms do this for giant companies, banks and governments.

The thing a consulting firm sells is the thinking time of its people. So it needs a steady flow of sharp, young people who can learn fast. This is one way to understand why they hire so many MBA students.

Bar chart: consulting 220 offers, management and marketing 158, finance 127 — Consulting led with 220 of the 546 offers.

Who else came hiring?

Management and marketing: 158 offers, or 28.94%. These came from big Indian and global companies such as Hindustan Unilever, ITC, Nestle, Procter & Gamble, Godrej, Airtel, the Aditya Birla Group and Tata Administrative Services. Marketing means making people want to buy something. Think of deciding the price, the packet and the ads for a new biscuit.

Finance: 127 offers, or 23.26%. The roles covered investment banking, private equity, venture capital and corporate finance, The Indian Express reported. An investment bank helps companies raise money or buy other companies. Private equity firms buy big stakes in grown companies. Venture capital is money given to young startups in return for a share of them. Firms here included Avendus, Bank of America, J.P. Morgan, Jefferies and Rothschild & Co.

Add the three big groups and you get 505 offers. The other 41 went to other areas.

Technology and product: Amazon, American Express, Google, Microsoft and Salesforce came for technology, digital and product management roles. A product manager decides what an app should do next, a bit like the captain who decides the batting order.

New faces: 51 companies hired from the campus for the first time. They included Asian Paints, L'Oreal, Mondelez International, L.E.K. Consulting, Samara Capital and UKG, The Times of India reported.

What did the institute say?

Director Alok Kumar Rai said the results "reinforce industry's continued trust" in the institute's brand, "the quality of our talent pool and the relevance of our industry-aligned curriculum", The Times of India reported.

The chairperson of placements, Sudarshan Kumar, pointed to the students, who run the whole process themselves. "This entirely student-run process reflects the autonomy and agency we entrust to our students," he said, The Indian Express reported.

The institute itself has a long history. Set up in November 1961, it is the oldest of the Indian Institutes of Management, and it moved to its campus at Joka in Kolkata in 1975, according to Wikipedia. This video from the institute's own channel shows that campus from the air.

Watch on YouTube

What does this tell a college student?

The list of companies is a map of who pays for business skills. Three kinds of employers took most of the offers. Consulting is about breaking a messy problem into small pieces. Banking and investing are about money and numbers. Selling soap, biscuits and phone plans is about understanding what shoppers like.

Tech companies are on the list too. And 51 newcomers show that the list keeps changing every year.

The money is big, but this is for a short summer stint, not a full year of salary. It still shows how much companies are ready to spend to get an early look at young talent. In this video, a student from the institute talks about a summer internship at P&G, one of the companies that hired from the campus this year.