We study nonsingular branched coverings of a homogeneous space X. There is a vector bundle associated with such a coveringwhich was conjectured by 0. Debarre to be ample when the Picard number of X is one. We prove this conjecture, which implies Barth-Lefschetz type theorems, for lagrangian grassmannians, and for quadrics up to dimension six. We propose a conjectural extension to homogeneous spaces of Picard number larger than one and prove a weaker version.