BENGALURU/NEW DELHI: A row has broken out between Deepinder Goyal, the founder of one of India’s most-valuable startups Zomato , and his alma mater IIT-Delhi , over campus placements, putting the spotlight on the intense competition among companies to hire top-flight talent.It began when Goyal walked into IIT-Delhi on Friday seeking a day-one slot to recruit students during the college’s placements session, usually a privileged extended to technology giants such as Google and Microsoft "The placement officer told us our salary package was too low to be given the day-one slot," said Goyal, chief executive of online restaurant guide Zomato. The company had said it would offer students it wanted to hire about Rs 16 lakh in annual compensation and employee stock options worth Rs 10 lakh."Campus placements in India are broken. Placement cells optimise only for money. Growth, esops, quality of work is secondary," Goyal said in a post on Twitter on Friday, triggering a debate on campus placement preferences at a time when salaries of mid-level staffers at startups, including ESOPs, threaten to eclipse that of senior executives at established technology companies.Flush with venture capital, high growth and global ambitions, companies like Zomato and Flipkart have been recruiting at top-tier campuses heavily. New-age technology startups and Internet companies raised more than $2.46 billion (or Rs 15,600 crore) in the first 6 months of this year, nearly double the amount they raised in all of last year. But startups often end up competing for talent at premier campuses with the likes of Google, Amazon, Adobe and Microsoft.This, despite Zomato matching salaries offered by such companies and including employee stock options to students hired from campuses, said Goyal. "The officer told us they don’t value ESOPs," he said.IIT-Delhi’s campus placement officer A Madan defended the college’s position. "Any company which has to compete for a slot has to match the cash salary offer. Zomato did not match the salary offer," she said. Zomato CEO tweeted back saying: "Exactly our point. They don’t understand ESOPs."Recruitment experts such as Anshuman Das, founder of Careernet , said while Zomato’s demand is legitimate, it takes time for institutions like the IITs to change."Any government-funded educational institute will have to defend, justify all decisions, especially if it’s a departure from an old, established practice," said Das, who graduated from IIT-Delhi in 1998."For them, the shares of listed companies are understandable, but ESOPs from private startups may not be so much," Das said. "But this practice needs to change, it might take time though."According to data published by IIT-Delhi, the average salary for batches graduating this year - including for students of B.Tech (Computer Science and Engineering), M. Tech (CSE) and M. Tech (Electronics and Communication Engineering) – was Rs 9.33 lakh a year. More than 80 companies visited the campus this year and made 201 full-time job offers. Fifty-three students were offered annual salaries above Rs 10 lakh and 148 between Rs 5 lakh to Rs 10 lakh.