Development and management
Business management studies at IWSB also addresses the social issues of economic development in rural India

By Madhushree Mazumdar
With changing economic policies and the globalisation of the market, it would be a fallacy to limit business management education to just corporate sector studies. Neither can it be contained only within urban limits. With the focus of the new government of India on “inclusive” governance, we need to address the social issues of economic development that is concentrated in rural areas. So be it with the market, that is not confined only to cities and towns. With 70 percent of the Indian population living in villages with agriculture as their livelihood, it is high time for our educational institutions to begin teaching on how to organise rural areas for better productivity and effective organisational management.

The imperatives of national and global sustainability, and even survival, requires to place in the mainstream the concerns of the communities and to implant organisational and managerial skills on them to promote business at the grassroots level. Only then will business management as a branch of education contribute to the economic progress of the country. The time is, therefore, ripe in India for all educational institutions offering management studies to introduce social management as a sector of learning. For business to find a sustainable course, it must fit its operations to the dictates of ecology and social equity.

Renowned business schools all over the world are, therefore taking note of such requirements and introducing this sector of management in their MBA courses. Harvard has developed a Rural Immersion Programme. Stanford (with their GMIX programme) and Wharton (with their WIVP programme) have all followed suit and introduced this topic to enrich their MBA students and tune them to present day requirements, to make their programme very special and their students more competitive. Today development management is talking of “inclusive planning and management”, whereby the people for whom development is being done are involved in the process of delivery. Some of these schools send their students to developing countries to contribute to Indian development programmes. They come and live in our villages and work with NGOs.

The reason why India is facing serious infrastructure shortages, as a result of which economic progress is tardy, is because of our earlier short-sightedness of not paying adequate attention to the development of rural areas to complement economic growth centres. Consequently rural-urban migration that has become necessary to obtain higher-order goods, services and jobs, has become a burden on large cities, where informal sector development deprives the city government of its taxes. In a vast country like India, with almost 70 per cent of its population living in the villages, rural development ought to have been better managed, to prevent the growth of chaotic and large urban concentrations that deter corporate sector development.

With this viewpoint in mind, the Indus World School of Business, of Career Education Foundation, has included in its postgraduate programme a short module on rural studies that arranges a fortnight’s visit for students to villages. Students from IWSB are sent to villages all over India, supported by NGOs taking up countryside issues to resolve or ameliorate.

Needless to say the students have gathered invaluable experience unheard of in business management schools in India. Two of our students have even started their own ventures in rural management.

— The writer is faculty member, Indus World School of Business (IWSB)