Institute of Rural Management Anand


Institute of Rural Management Anand is an autonomous institution and premier business school located in Anand Gujarat, India with the mandate of contributing to the professional management of rural organisations. IRMA was founded with the belief, borne out by Verghese Kurien’s work in the dairy co-operatives which revolutionized the dairy industry in the country, that the key to effective rural development is professional management.It is consistently ranked as one of India's best business schools. Also it is considered as the best business school in the Rural and Agricultural Business Management Sector of India.
The Institute was established with the support of the Swiss Agency for Development and Corporation, the Government of India, the erstwhile Indian Dairy Corporation, the NDDB and the Government of Gujarat.IRMA campus was designed by the famous architect Achyut Kanvinde.
IRMA provides management training, support and research facilities to students committed to rural development; in this process it has brought within its ambit several co-operatives, non-government organisations, government development agencies, international development organisations and funding agencies.
Over the years the convocation of IRMA is graced by National and International luminaries from the academic, cultural, spiritual and political spheres. Former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi attended IRMA's first annual convocation in 1982.

History

Michael Halse, then a Food and Agriculture Organization planning adviser with NDDB, was one of the members responsible for conceptualizing this new discipline of rural management. Another person involved with the institute was the organizational behavior academic Dr. Kamala Chowdhary, who also served briefly as the director of the institute and played a key mentoring role in its formative years. The former director of Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad Ravi J. Matthai contributed; through his documented learning from the Jawaja experiment. Matthai stressed the need for a new type of management education, different from the conventional Indian Institute of Management one: for working on rural development problems.
The institute was initially budgeted as a center for management and consultancy for rural development, under the second phase of the Operation Flood program. Under the chairmanship of Dr. Verghese Kurien, IRMA evolved quickly to enlarge its mandate to professionalize management of rural producers’ organisations and create a body of knowledge in the field of rural management.
One of the pioneering and senior faculty in the initial years was anthropologist and equity-feminist scholar Leela Dube. One of her studies, through field work in five Southeast Asian countries, put the organisation on the international social science research map.
Beginning with co-operatives funded by NDDB, IRMA has reached out to the rural sector through development organizations engaged with issues of rural life such as natural resource management, rural health, local governance institution, livelihood, migration, micro finance, and deploying IT for rural areas.
Since inception, the focus of IRMA has been on strengthening the management capacities in non-governmental organisations and organisations that are controlled by users of the services. IRMA claims that its branding and commitment to a unique field of management makes it unique among management institutes of India.

Rankings

IRMA was ranked 5th Best B School in Chronicle India B- School Survey 2019, IRMA was ranked 5th best B-school among the top 75 private B-schools of India and 10th overall among the top 100 B-schools of India, as per Times B-School Survey 2019. IRMA Ranked 8th in UTD Top 10 Indian Business School Ranking for Research.
The National Institutional Ranking Framework ranked it 72 among management colleges in 2020. It was ranked 17 in Outlook's "Top 150 Private MBA Institutions" of 2020 ranking.

Dr. Verghese Kurien Memorial lecture

To commemorate the memory of the founder of the Institute, an annual Dr. Verghese Kurien Memorial Lecture, has been instituted from 2012: to be held on his birth anniversary.
The first lecture in 2012 was delivered by M. S. Swaminathan.
The second lecture in 2013 was delivered by Vijay Shankar Vyas.
The third lecture in 2014 was delivered by the Governor of Reserve Bank of India, Raghuram Rajan.
The fourth annual lecture in 2015 was delivered by the Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India, Arvind Subramanian on 21 November 2015.

Campus facilities

The campus is fully residential and equipped with student hostels, mess, lecture halls, seminar rooms, library, faculty and administrative offices, auditorium, executive training and development centre, faculty and staff housing, dispensary, and other support facilities. The IRMA staff co-operative store caters to the residents’ daily necessities. Faculty and staff live in the campus quarters provided, thereby providing facilities for interaction with the participants beyond classrooms.
A co-operative store on the campus is open in the evenings six days a week and provides all the items required by the residents on the campus. It is stocked with provisions and stationery.
A campus dispensary supplies medication. The medical officer visits the campus for an hour every day, and a staff nurse resides on the campus to attend to medical emergencies.

Notable faculty