Business schools in India have never had it better. Indian Institute of Management Lucknow is the latest in the list of B-schools that have reported 100 per cent placement.

At IIM-L, 220 students received 302 job offers from 85 companies, which comes to 1.37 offers per student. The highest salary offered was Rs 30 lakh (Rs 3 million) per year.

The average salary offered was Rs 632,000 per annum, compared with Rs 615,000 in 2003. Last year, only 250 offers were made during the placement process. This year, overseas firms have offered 11 jobs.

"The improvement was largely because of the contemporary and market-focussed courses that were introduced last year. A buoyant economy also helped matters," said R Srinivasan, chairman, placement committee, IIM-L.

IIM-L has introduced subjects like insurance management and laid emphasis on areas such as corporate restructuring, mergers and acquisitions, capital markets and derivatives trading.

"We have fine-tuned our courses to enable our students to thrive in the present business environment," said Srinivasan.

This year, nearly 37 per cent of the students favoured the sales and marketing offers. This was followed by finance, IT and consultancy.

Surprisingly, it was public sector State Bank of India that made the maximum number of offers this year. Other big recruiters included PricewaterhouseCoopers, IBM, Cognizant Technologies, GE Capital, Accenture, Wipro and HSBC.

According to Srinivasan there were some 10-12 offers for various functions in the agriculture and food processing business. This has prompted IIM-L to introduce a new course on agribusiness starting this year.