IRMA to review placements

B-SCHOOL: Twenty-seven years after its inception, the rural management institute feels the urge to do some soul-searching and reconfigure itself.

Disturbed over the trend of an increasing number of its management graduates choosing to work with the banking and insurance sectors, Institute of Rural Management (IRMA), Anand, has decided to review its placement policy.

An internal committee will do a preliminary report on the campus placements done in the past few years and a new policy would be in place later this August.

Over the past few years, IRMA has been placing more than 50 per cent of its management graduates in the banking and insurance sectors (ICICI bank being its largest recruiter). Around 20 per cent of the graduates make it to the NGO sector and 25 per cent to the cooperative sector. This is what has prompted the management review of its placement policy.

The IRMA management argues that financial sector companies which come for campus recruitment can approach other B-schools for talent. Since IRMA was formed with a specific purpose of serving the cooperative sector, this drift in its placements would deny deserving companies of good quality MBAs.

Says Debi Prasad Mishra, professor, rural management, "In recent years, the proportion of our graduates choosing to work with cooperative businesses, government and non government development organisations (NGOs), has steadily declined.

"There has been an increasing trend towards placement in rural banking, insurance and 'trading' organisations which do not strictly fall either in the 'cooperative sector' or the 'NGO' sector. This has happened partly because of the changing environmental context and partly because of a kind of drift in placement policy. It is our placement policy that includes only rural cooperatives, government and non government development organisations in the campus placement, that has been the single most distinguishing factor of the Institute and it is here that there is a need for review."

IRMA was established in 1980 to train rural managers in the context of Operation Flood, by V Kurien, the then Chairman, National Dairy Development Board (NDDB), Anand, and the erstwhile Indian Dairy Corporation (IDC). However, the institute has been in news for wrong reasons due to the contestations at the governance level with battles fought in various courts.

For most of 2004 and till about the end of May 2006, the governing board could not function, notes Mishra, adding that the director stayed dismissed and the appointment of acting director remained contested. Governance matters remained mired in a spate of court cases.

"The governing board has had its first meeting in over a year, recently. It has begun the search process for chairman and director. The board has given itself a three-month period to complete the process and in another three months, the institutional functioning would get back to normal."

The uncertainty at the governance level has impacted the functions of the institute. The academic activities have taken a beating though are not grounded. A lot of reflection is necessary to understand why the institute got into the type of institutional problem that it was in for most part of the preceding year.

"We have to delve deep to analyse and reconfigure critical institutional structures and processes such that we regain our vigour and re-energise our efforts in the direction of our mission," concludes Mishra.