Startups withdraw internships offers to B-school students amid second wave of Covid-19

“Sorry, your internship offer has been revoked due to Covid-19.”
First-year MBA students across IIMs – from Lucknow to Shillong - and other B-schools have taken to professional networking site LinkedIn to air their displeasure after companies revoked internship offers citing economic uncertainty following the Covid-19 second wave.

From cybersecurity to business-to-business sales and mid-sized startups, companies across sectors have informed B-school placement cells that the internships are on hold or that they would not pay stipends, at least a dozen MBA students told ET.

“They should’ve told us before. They kept on stalling,” a student at one of the IIMs said, asking specifically that the IIM be not named.

Over 1,000 students from MBA and Engineering colleges like IIT-Bombay, various IIMs, Wellingkar Mumbai, Delhi University, Symbiosis Pune, and Banaras Hindu University have filled out a form between April 28-April 30 to obtain an internship through Mission Summer Internship an initiative by Mission Helping Hands.

"These are the students whose internships have gotten revoked due to the second phase of Covid," says Dr Shubhra Chakraborty, founder of Mission Helping Hands. The initiative placed 384 students for summer internships last year when the first wave of the pandemic hit. It received over 1,700 registration over a period of two weeks. "Our number this year is going to be higher than last year. We launched just three days ago," says Chakraborty.

ET could not independently verify how many such internship offers had been refused across the B-schools.

The IIM student said the withdrawal was announced just three days before his joining date despite repeatedly checking with the internal placement cell leading up to the start date.


“We lost a month, I would have gone to some other company and interned,” he said.

For many students who have a hefty education loan to repay, an internship is key to step up from the first to the second year.

The uncertainty is now causing them to take up any role on offer.

“People are trying to exploit us for work we do as an intern,” said a 25-year-old who took to LinkedIn to find an internship after his offer was withdrawn. “It has become a joke at this point. They are hiring from IIM and they don’t want to pay. That hurts.”

Another student whose internship offered was not honoured said: “We are looking for new opportunities through our own contacts but it’s difficult due to the ongoing pandemic.”

A 23-year-old MBA student from Bareilly, Uttar Pradesh, was informed by a Mumbai-based ed-tech startup a week after joining that he would no longer be paid due to “pandemic-related reasons.”

“Business valuation can be done from home. I would have done it on my laptop even if I was working out of their Noida office. There is no difference,” the student, who has taken an education loan of Rs 17 lakh, said.

A friend’s offer to intern at an NSE-listed manufacturing company was postponed indefinitely last week, he added.

According to several students, Israel-based cybersecurity company Gamasec, which had plans to expand in India, withdrew scores of summer internship offers from IIMs and other B-schools.

Explaining why, a former senior executive at the firm said the role had required them be physically present in its office in Bengaluru.

E-commerce content startup Mason had to pull back summer internship offers in its marketing department as the team leads were infected with Covid-19.


The company has, however, on-boarded interns in operations and sales, said Kausambi Manjita, founder and CEO of the Accel and Lightspeed Venture Partners-funded startup.

“You have an obligation to people who join to make them successful. It is worse for someone to join you especially fresh out of college and have nobody to support you,” Manjita said, adding that placement cells at top-tier colleges were scrambling to help students.

On Friday, she received one such request from the placement cell of a top-tier management institute to onboard a student for a six-week internship, for free.

A spokesperson for IIM Bangalore declined to comment on how many summer internship offers had been withdrawn.

IIM Indore did not respond to similar queries.


Full-time offers out

Some MBA grads are still reeling from the economic after-effects of the first wave.

Shubham Ram, who completed his Post Graduate Diploma in Management from IIEBM-Indus Business School in Pune, was offered a job at HDFC Ergo last year with a joining date in June.


The company repeatedly deferred that for eight months, said Ram, who had taken a Rs 10 lakh student loan to fund his MBA dream.

In February this year, the company's HR person “left the WhatsApp group and revoked our offer,” he said.

“They smashed our future. They should have informed us sooner or said we will come to you, but bharosa mat rakho (don't count on us),” Ram, who is currently working night shifts at a small Pune-based company, added.

"HDFC ERGO has not revoked any offer formally made to any of the candidates," a company spokesperson said.

Hiring of fresh graduates for non-technology roles has also slowed slightly, according to Anshuman Das, CEO of CareerNet and Longhouse Consulting, which counts Flipkart, Goldman Sachs and Tata Consultancy Services among its clients.