AHMEDABAD: Dollar salaries don’t ring too many bells here. An overseas posting could mean the challenge of starting a one-teacher school in a remote Bhutanese village; and Day Zero is the day when you manage to recoup the first Rs 100 you shelled out by way of a micro finance loan to a poor farmer in Warangal.
Yet this is a campus placement, and this too is a B-school. The placement season here coincides with a larger-than-life version of what’s currently taking place in the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, barely 100 km away.
Welcome to the world of the Institute of Rural Management, Anand (IRMA), a B-school that’s high in demand as state administrations, micro-finance institutions and educational institutions realise that the developmental process in India doesn’t lack money, it’s just awfully short of capable hands that can manage it.
A week ago, on the very first day of its campus placement season IRMA managed to place all its students of the 2010 batch. Sure, no bulge-bracket figures here, the average salary stood at Rs 6 lakh per annum, 20% higher than last year’s.
But each of the 65 students received more than two job offers. And among the top recruiters were the tribal welfare divisions of the state governments and organisations involved in livelihood projects with names like Hole-In-The-Wall and Basix.
IRMA managed this despite the absence of banks, both public and private sector, that usually recruit around 50% of the students every year. Placement coordinator professor Saswata Narayan Biswas says over 45 organisations approached IRMA this year, of which 19 were invited to the campus.
So what explains this rush at a campus devoted to management at the grassroot level?
Magsaysay winner and IRMA board member Deep Joshi says that the institute scores because the Indian education system fails to encourage students to work in rural areas. “Funding is no more a problem in the past 10 years or so with the Centre promoting schemes like NREG. However, the development sector lacks talented and knowledgeable people who can work in rural India and guide people to utilise their funds in an appropriate manner,” he says.
At Placements 2010, Hyderabad-based livelihood organisation Basix picked up the highest number — 12 students. “Former IRMA candidates have not only grown with Basix but have also started their own initiatives. We will deploy the students in all the functional areas as management trainees for a couple of years. They will work in consulting, agriculture, energy, climate change, IT and HR,” says Rama Kadamb, who heads leadership development at Basix, which operates in 12 states.
Hole-in-the-Wall, an organisation working on education through learning stations, recruited two students to be placed in Bhutan for project work.
The Andhra Pradesh government wants to engage the IRMA students it picked up in its tribal welfare department while the Gujarat government has recruited for its Development Support Agency and Gujarat State Disaster Management Authority. Madhya Pradesh roped in an IRMA student for a World Bank project.
Out of 65, over 25 students were placed with the state governments while organisations engaged in microfinance and livelihood projects recruited 30, says Mr Biswas. Among others, headhunters from traditional placement participants Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation (Amul) and National Dairy Development Board recruited nine students while ITC picked up three for its e-Chaupal.
IRMA, set up in 1979 by India’s milkman Verghese Kurien, has enlisted over 650 organisations, which can participate in the placement process. “Placements for 2010 has once again proved the faith of organisations engaged with microfinance and livelihood activities in IRMA by recruiting students in a big way,” says IRMA director Vivek Bhandari.
