A team from Institute of Management Technology Ghaziabad took top honors in Pangaea, a United Nations-style debate held as part of Passion ’11, IMT-G’s annual four-day B-School festival.
Representing Germany in the UN simulation, the team of Kunal and S. Vignesh won out over five other finalists and walked away with the Rs 8000 first prize.
The six teams were each assigned a country – Mexico, France, Germany, India, the United States and the United Kingdom were the countries – and the topic up for debate, and presentation of motions, was climate change, environmental degradation and the effects of development on the environment.
The team which raised the most ideas and got some motions passed was the winner. It was no easy task, with the top team putting in five days of solid research on Germany’s position and the promotion of renewable sources of energy.
“We have seen what ideologies different countries have and how they are willing to co-operate with other countries to tackle environmental issues,” said Kunal and S. Vignesh, adding Pangaea “has actually been a very good experience.”
They agreed: “It gave me a platform to test my communication skills and I got the opportunity to learn a lot about the economics of different countries.”
The two noted: “In our business school we learned a lot of things about how we should negotiate with people in business dealings and all. Such an event (Pangaea) provides us with a real life opportunity to implement what we are learning. It gave us a lot of knowledge about how different markets are there and how different economic functions work in economies and how they need to collaborate with others in terms of international trade and international motions.”
Their biggest challenge was also from IMT-G, the team representing India which came in second.
“They had reasonable arguments about per capita use of energy. If you consider per capita energy consumption of India and China it is very less as compared to the developed countries – so India was a challenge.”
Pangaea was just one of many events at the four-day Passion ’11 extravaganza, considered to be the “Mecca” of B-School festivals, which saw intense competitions centred around – on the business side – marketing, finance, operations, human resources, consultancy and information technology; and on the cultural side – music, dance, drama and literature. The gala event was capped by a battle of the bands on Oct. 12.