The number of humanities students is increasing at Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad (IIM-A) which was, so far, considered the fiefdom of engineering students.

IIM-A witnessed an impressive rise of 66% in the number of arts students making it to the premiere business school in the past three years. The numbers rose from 3 in the academic batch of 2015-17 to 20 in 2017-19.

According to the admission data for the PGP course in IIM-A, as many as 20 students (5.06%) out of total 395 had got admission in this academic year. It was 9 (2.27%) and 3 (0.76%) in the academic year of 2016-18 and 2015-17, respectively.

According to the figures, the number of students with engineering background had declined from 361 in 2015-17 to 265 in 2017-19. The institute registered a decline of 24.07% in the three academic batches.

What's more, the institute has the youngest batch ever this academic year with 30 students below 20 years of age enrolling in the institute.

The average age of the students in post-graduate programme (PGP) is just 23 this academic year; it was 24 in the previous two academic years. This is an indication that students across the country are preparing early for entry into IIMs.

Prof Ashish Nanda, director of IIM-A, attributed the increase of students from different backgrounds to the institute's efforts at inclusive diversity.

"IIM-A has a discussion-based learning environment and a lot of learning derives from shared experiences and insights of the participants. Our hope is that if we have diverse classrooms, people will bring their different life experiences and knowledge into the class and benefit everybody," said Nanda.

Nanda stressed that the institute needs to focus more on four aspects of diversity - gender-diversity; discipline-based diversity; work experience-based diversity; and international diversity for cross cultural exchanges.