Mumbai: Students desirous of getting admissions in the country's esteemed Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) will have no respite at least this year for hopping from campus in a state to another as the apex institutes have decided to continue with the existing system of admission to conduct group discussions and personal interviews independently.

The Union Human Resource Development (HRD) Ministry, with the new IIMs also starting their academic session this year, had asked the B-schools to come up with a unified plan to save the trouble faced by students while travelling to various campuses.

Some of the IIMs, however, have already started with their arrangements to conduct the admissions process individually.

The Chairman of admissions at one of the IIMs addressed the issue and came out with two major reasons due to which a unified admission process could not be conducted.

He said that, "The IIMs have a varied criteria for admissions due to which devising a common platform becomes difficult. Designing a common admission process requires time and we fall short of it as of now."

"The technical glitches which took place during the Common Admission Test (CAT) occupied us so much that we are left with no time to conduct common group discussions and personal interviews this year," said another head of admissions.

According to the sources in the HRD, four new IIMs are to function this year in Trichy, Haryana, Rajasthan and Jharkhand.

The Directors of all the IIMs, later this week, are scheduled to meet HRD Minister, Kapil Sibal, to inform him of the recent development that the older IIMs are to conduct the admissions for the new ones.

This news has aggravated the anxiety of the students as they now have to travel almost in most of the states of India to get admitted into the prestigious management institutions.

However, another development says that those lucky few who would receive the call from all the IIMs are deemed to get admission in some of the older B-schools.

A faculty member at IIM Ahmedabad explained that, "A lot of issues are obvious to crop up with the advent of younger IIMs like Indore, Lucknow and Shillong and the absolutely new ones."