NEW DELHI: Young leaders graduating out of India’s top business schools are turning more entrepreneurial with more of them taking the startup path than ever before. The class of 2016 at leading B-schools including IIM Calcutta Faculty of Management Studies , and XLRI has seen at least 50% more grads chasing the entrepreneurial dream.IIM Calcutta has six students opting out of placements to pursue their startup ideas compared to half this number in the 2015 batch. At XLRI, 5 students have opted to become entrepreneurs vis-à-vis a single such instance in the previous year. At least four students joined the entrepreneurship bandwagon at IIM Kozhikode this year compared to only one last year. At FMS, 13 students are keen on taking the plunge compared to 7 last year. At IIM Shillong, this year, two students opted to turn entrepreneurs compared to only one last year.Traditionally, top engineering colleges have large number of students opting to become entrepreneurs right out of campus.The trend is now catching on at India's top business schools too.Several factors are working together to raise the entrepreneurial temperature at B-schools.The success and celebration of several entrepreneurs and the mind boggling valuations their ventures have acquired and a vigorous push coming from the top most levels of the government are aiding this. Moreover, at the ground level, B-schools are also trying to create an entrepreneurial ecosystem and are encouraging students in this direction with deferred placement schemes, encouragement and mentoring by alumni etc.“IIMs and other Bschools have become very liberal with giving the deferred placement option to students,” said Abhiraj Bhal, cofounder of UrbanClap and also an alumnus of IIM Ahmedabad.“The eco-system as such has also come of age. With the government talking much more about start-ups, the confidence at the campuses is the highest now,” Bhal adds. B-schools are also weaving entrepreneurship into the curriculum.“Other than deferred placement, the institute also offers a specialisation in Entrepreneurship that attributes three-fourths of the academic credits to on-field implementation of ideas,” said Bhavya Kapoor, officer placements at IIM Indore. She adds that student initiatives like the entrepreneurship summit (i5 Summit) and ‘The Start-Up Milestone’ are also igniting the passion for entrepreneurship. A recent slight deceleration in investments in startups is not eroding interest in campuses. About $8 billion in venture capital investments flowed into startups in 2015 and may not rise much this year.“The funding in the start-ups is likely to remain the same this year, but that does not mean that number of deals will decline,” Lightbox Ventures, principal and founding member, Nitin Sharma told ET. “VCs are still hungry for robust business model lead start-ups.”Sharma also points out that though the average amount of investment in each startup may decline, the number of investments are rising.B-schools also point out that apart from students turning entrepreneurs straight out of college, many more do so after working for a couple of years.“A large number of our students are interested in start-ups.However they prefer to join a large corporate for 2-5 years, gain experience and then get into the startup mode,” said Sapna Agarwal, Head, Career Development Services, IIM Bangalore.