mumbai the fragility of the traditional mba exposed by economic duress bschools have had to sit up and take notice of the fledgling sectors that have registered consistent growth in the changing world and seem full of promise as a natural response business colleges around the world have started offering courses in just about every emerging sector traditionally offered in finance marketing human resource and operations there are now courses on water management logistics global retail mining education medical management all now considered the new highprotein on cvs and indian students are queuing up for them while several mba colleges in the us are offering joint degrees with their campus schools several uk universities have married an ms programme with a business degree allowing students to complete a year in a subject that is niche and then pick up the tools of management torontos schulich school of business just launched a global mining management programme to support the industry that has a deficit of knowledge workers dean dezs j horvth said the discipline that has come into many of these newage sectors has forced business schools to deliver the requisite high quality manpower peter tufano dean of oxfords said business schools agrees the world is a different place today and it needs a relook at when we did that we realized there were so many sectors we were not catering to he told toi we realized that we needed to produce tshaped managers those who will get both the breadth and the depth of a good business education tufano added so candidates can study an ms in any of the 200plus subjects and then study business harvard business school also offers joint mbas with its other schools kennedy school its law school medicine school and dental medicine college stanford graduate school of business also allows candidates to sign up for a joint degree in mba with their school of education or the school of humanities for a public policy programme or the law school or the school of earth sciences takers for these courses show more students from india are looking at going beyond the conventional mba ashish jhina from kotkhai a tiny village in the himalayan region is one such student who completed his mba from stanford with a specialization in water management he pursued an mba and an msc environmental resources after completing biochemistry at the indian institute of technologydelhi specialized mba programmes have always been useful but ultimately things depend on the quality of institution and also the ability of the student said anjali bansal managing director of the chicagoheadquartered leadership consulting and executive firm spencer stuarts india business some of the specialized business management programmes have been extremely relevant even in the past like hospital and retail management in fact some of the premier bschools in the us have extremely wellregarded specialized programmes she added for example yale school of management has a real estate specialization while cornell has a famous real estate mba programme