BENGALURU: Startups are offering stipends for summer internships at top B schools and colleges that are almost equal to the salaries of the full time jobs in established companies, reports ET. In this battle of talent, ventures are raising the amount and sometimes doubling the stipends offered and thus a war is raging between these categories.

A talent assessment and analytics platform provider, Jombay raised its stipend from last year’s 50,000 to 1.16 lakh this year. Mohit Gundecha, CEO and Co-Founder of Jombay said, “We do not get a lot of research based talent and need them to work in talent assessment. The stipends therefore have to be similar to their salaries.”

Anuja Sivaram, head of operations at Code Nation said, “There is a huge war for talent, 1 lakh a month stipend helps in top of-the-mind recall. It helps when we compete with a Google to get students on board.”

Companies like Codenation and Jombay are paying 1 lakh per month, whereas a two month stipend of 1 lakh is also paid by Jombay, Foodpanda, Paytm and Snapdeal. Many companies like Nomura, JPMorgan, American Express, Deloitte, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs have also raised their stipends by 10 to 15 percent.

The battle doesn’t end here. These companies are not only giving high stipends, they have also raised the number of interns recruited per year. The e-commerce giant, Flipkart appointed 300 interns this year which was 150 last year. Snapdeal and Practo are hiring many interns this year as compared to last year from institutions like BITS Pilani, National Institute of Technology, Karnataka, IIT Hyderabad and National Institute of Design.

Pushpendra Priyadarshi, chairperson at IIM Lucknow said, “The large firms with established internship processes will not get impacted, but the mid-tier companies will face a problem now.”

While Suresh Subudhi, partner and director at BCG India said, “I doubt the startups and ecommerce companies will be a game-changer. We provide a career graph, value proposition and international growth.”

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