“Sorry, your internship offer has been revoked due to Covid-19.”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. ET could not independently verify how many such internship offers had been refused across the B-schools, but a cursory glance at LinkedIn shows scores of rejection posts by students seeking internships elsewhere.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’ve gone to some other company and interned.” 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.82333396The 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us for work we do as an intern,” said a 25-year-old who took to LinkedIn to find an internship after his offer was withdrawn.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.