Ahmedabad, March 13: Though a graduate from the Bangalore campus has topped the official salary list at the annual placements, the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, isn’t ready to accept defeat just yet.

Gaurav Agarwal has set a record for the IIMs by bagging a $193,000 (about Rs 85 lakh) offer from Barclays Capital for a position in London, smashing the earlier record held by an IIM Ahmedabad graduate. But Ahmedabad still hopes to win at the post.

“The picture will be clear only when Manan Ahuja, one of our three graduates who have also been recruited by Barclays, gets to know about his final pay packet,’’ said the Ahmedabad institute director, Bakul Dholakia.

Sidharth Mehla, 25, and Mayank Navlakha, 25, will be joining Barclays’ Singapore office on a salary of $185,000. It was during their 10-week summer internship in Singapore that they received their offers in August 2005. Ahuja, 26, got his during the recent recruitment drive.

Ahuja, an IIT graduate from Delhi, has three years’ work experience. He will be posted in New York after a few months of training in London.

“Since the salaries are based on the location,’’ Dholakia felt, “Ahuja is expected to get not less than Gaurav Agarwal, who will be taking up his assignment in London.’’

A day before the placement was to officially get over, all the students of the second-year postgraduate programme bagged jobs.

Of the 235 students at the placement, 90 got overseas offers of whom 18 opted for domestic jobs. This, to Dholakia, was “the real Indian success story’’.

Some of them will now earn five times less than what the foreign jobs offered, yet they were firm about their choice, said students placement co-ordinator Rajiv.

The average entry-level domestic salary rose from Rs 7.9 lakh a year last year to Rs 9.72 lakh. Among the major investment banks ? Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley ? Barclays was the top recruiter with 16 offers accepted.

Tax ‘dispute’

Dholakia said the service tax imposed on top B-schools was “disputed” and could be taken up at a meeting of IIM directors next month.

“The IIMs are not a manpower recruitment agency as interpreted (by the ministry),” he told reporters.

He said the institute had corresponded with the government on the issue, which is a “matter of interpretation and thereby disputed”.

Dholakia said the institute spent Rs 3.5 lakh on each postgraduate student, of which Rs 1.5 lakh was recovered as fees and the rest from firms that came for campus recruitment.