Diary of a Rural Manager!

Sparsh: Development in a Trimester of rural management - 4... : An IRMA Prof. Arunathan always ask a very profound question on poor and rural managers : “Why we are here and why they are there? ” There ...

66th Week@XIMB - 09th September to 15th September, 2012 09th September - Nothing of importance happened today in my life. Yet, I was sad. There was the demise of a great figure among the community of rural managers. The father of White Revolution, Verghese Kurien, is no more with us. 10th September - There is a great article paying tribute to Dr Verghese Kurien - Inspiration to a Rural Manager . Dr. Kurien is being limited by the media as a man who has created Amul, the Brand of India. His contribution is much more than forming the brand Amul. He created a legacy in successfully running a cooperative and never succumbing to political pressure. This becomes more pronounced in the context of the failure of the cooperative movement in India. I was reading QRM in detail for the exam. There was ga reat revelation because I had not taken an interest in the elective course from the start. I got a few facts right from a research paper by Fekede Tuli . 1- The quantitative purists artic...

65th Week@XIMB - 2nd September to 8th September 2012 2nd September - I submitted a team project report on Asian Paints in SDM. The whole process of data mining, compilation, editing, and printing with the team was good learning. There was a scheduled industry talk of SREI Sahaj CEO on Sunday afternoon. The topic of the Talk was 'challenges in the service delivery channel and route to market strategies in rural India'. It began late on time but went quite fantastic overall. The Key learning - ' Positive dissatisfaction ' is a good start for a young professional like us. There are more standard operating procedures and compliance in a big company, hence it is not a good option for fresher to start their work there. Guest : Mr. Sanjay Panigrahi , CEO of SREI Sahaj No rural people will pay for information on weather and government schemes. So business for information directly to the end consumer is not a viable option currently. Delivery and Management should be the...

64th Week@XIMB - 26th August to 1st September, 2012 26th August Past performance are not an accurate predictor of future outcomes. Yet they can give a reference line about the academic career of the person. So much can be said in reference to the academics grades. Are we the student more than the CV and grades? There was also a lot of thinking gone over the news item - Placement reportage: How the DMS, IIT Delhi 2012 placement report is designed to mislead you? . This shoddy practices of fudging placement report without having a real-world experience of running a values-driven company possess a serious ethical challenge. It is actually a less known but well performed malpractice in most of the B-School! While army officers go beyond the call of duty sacrificing life for the country, investment bankers do exactly opposite. I can understand root cause of such problems in our education system only that never punishes plagiarism and other such activities. This makes me deeply cr...

63rd Week@XIMB - 19th August to 25th August, 2012 20th August - Since 1997 Dr Debal Deb has been conserving 700 varieties of native rice that seed companies are trying to drive out. He works for biodiversity conservation, knowledge transfer and non-commercial seed exchange within and beyond India's indigenous communities. Folk Rice Dr Debal Deb 21st August -  Today is my birthday. I will only quote Benjamin Franklin on life : "Content to live, content to die unknown, Lord of myself, accountable to none." 21st August I participated in Kurukshetra and Spardha Launch. There was a good Harvard Business review article uploaded by SDM faculty : Ending the War Between Sales and Marketing by Philip Kotler, Neil Rackham, Suj Krishnaswamy ( Complete Reading ) 22nd August -  There was presentation on OSCARD by our group in CM. We cam ro know about: Narasimham Committee on Banking Sector Reforms (1998) . There was discussion on MFI Andhra Crisis in MFM class. What...

62nd Week@XIMB - 12th August to 19th August, 2012 12th August - There is a policy paralysis in India. There are concerns over contraction in industrial output and drought need to be addressed soon. India's economic growth could fall below 5 per cent in the the first quarter of current fiscal. 13th August - Mr. K. Ramkumar, Executive Director on the Board of ICICI Bank is responsible for Human Resources, Customer Service & Operations. Are top business schools losing sight of what hirers want? is a probing article by him with a countering answer from N. Ravichandran, Director IIM Indore - Institutions need time to mature made by day. RBI had released long ago Malegam Committee Report on micro-finance. Report of the RBI Sub-Committee of its Central Board of Directors to study Issues and concerns in the micro finance institutions (MFI) Sector . 14th August - I had taken an interesting question for the research while doing later assignment of QRM. How students of PDGM-...

61st Week@XIMB - 5th August to 11th August, 2012 5th August - Professor Dilip Soman from the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, speaks at a conference about behavioral economics and mental accounting. Fear of Finance: Financial Literacy and Planning for Post secondary Education 6th August - One of our faculty is an IRMA alumnus. She shared a valuable insight about rural management course. IRMA has no case studies as reading material in its early years. Faculty, students and visiting fellow of the institute thrived hard to develop their own case research material. Today, we all are benefiting from their ground work. As long as basic principles of reliability, rigour, precision and validity are followed, the research quality will always be good. There is a great and valuable resource of Working Papers (228) on IRMA website useful for rural managers. These working Papers provide an opportunity for IRMA faculty, visiting fellows and students to sound out their...

60th Week@XIMB - 29th July to 4th August, 2012 29th July - Sunday is celebrated through a video on rural marketing sharing experiences of Airtel, M&M, and Hero Honda in rural India Eyeing on the monsoon reality, farmers in northern India always use the  proverbs of Ghagh aur Bhaddari for weather forecasting. There has been a research paper - Farming proverbs: analysis of Their Dynamics and Farmers' Knowledge by Ranjay K Singh and A Dorjey. The linkage of good monsoons and the Indian market is too close still we keep ignoring the reality of the rural market. With inadequate monsoons rural consumption falls and so do the overall sales of agri-input companies. There are many more companies whose sales are indirectly dependent on the agricultural cycle but with the poor monsoon that will also go down. Farmers try to maximize their returns in times of drought through the use of local, non-hybrid seed varieties and cheaper micro-irrigation. 30th July - A two-day worksh...

59th Week@XIMB - 22nd July to 28th July, 2012 22nd July - Sunday was gone in studying for mid term exams. Raising an Olympian - MARY KOM : As the Proud Sponsor of Mom, P&G presents a series about the Mom behind each Olympic athlete. 23rd July - ESM exam is over.The big news was about Hindustan Unilever Ltd. HUL increased its net profit by 112 per cent for the first quarter of 2012-13 to Rs.1,331.2 crore, thanks largely to a one-time gain on sale of property amounting to Rs.607 crore. Hindustan Unilever Profit More than Doubles on Strong Sales and Speaking at company AGM , HUL Chairman Harish Manwani lays emphasis on role of corporate in financial inclusion. 24th July - Tuesday was a holiday. I came across an article: How Hindustan Unilever is making every employee a marketer . 25th July - Mid Term exam of MFM was more analytic than based on rote learning. With Q2 session results are coming, companies are coming up with reports. Here a positive news from ...

58th Week@XIMB - 15th July to 21st July, 2012 15th July - Sunday is always wasted in some entertainment and long sleep. Today there was Individual Profile verification for Brochure and work ex certificate submission by placecom. 16th July - In QRM lecture, there is lot of emphasis given on ethical behavior of the researcher. A researcher must not opt either for socially desirable or biased answers for personal economic benefits. Such type of researchers /journalist are hard to find these days. 17th July - Rural poverty can be attributed a lot to ecological poverty or in easy terms biomass scarcity available for commons. Hence, a rural development program must be quite eco-specific. Auxiliary benefit of NREGA includes eco-restoration & regeneration of natural resources.Once upon a time, World Bank sees NREGA as policy barrier hurting economic development and poverty alleviation. 18th July - One opportunity for XIMB is to track performance in state livelihood mission...

57th Week@XIMB - 8th July to 14th July, 2012 08th July - The rest-day must be utilized in watching good video from you-tube. So, here comes a video where with wisdom, eloquence and wit, Anupam Mishra talks about the amazing feats of engineering built centuries ago by the people of India's Golden Desert to harvest water. A simple as yet a very accurate presentation of the actual state of Rajasthan. Anupam Mishra: The ancient ingenuity of water harvesting 09th July - There was discussion on a case study :- ICICI Bank: Challenges in Rural Banking in SDM lecture. Abstract : ICICI Bank challenge is to set up and ran an effective sales and distribution system (that is primarily non branch based) for rural Banking lending business and to scale up and so profitably. 10th July - Our Ecological Footprint is growing larger. Ecological Footprint is a standardized measure of demand for natural capital that may be contrasted with the planet's ecological capacity to regenerate...

56th Week@XIMB - 1st July to 7th July, 2012 1st July - There was an interactive session with Mr. Paul Polak, Founder and Director of IDE ( International Development Enterprises )in the Auditorium. Paul Polak‘s latest adventure is Spring Health , which plans to provide access to clean water to 10 million people within four years. I am embedding TED talk delivered by the Paul. He wrote a book 'Out of Poverty' on his tryst with poverty. TEDxMileHigh - Paul Polak - The Future Corporation Quote: “Talk to the people who have the problem and listen to what they have to say.” 2nd July - I have still a lot to catch up in writing a priori reasoning and null hypothesis in AMDA. Yet, I am happy to learn in details about forecasting and estimation method. Mathematical model is helpful in making decision with a holistic view of economy. Thanks to IndiaStat for amass of data to experiment with. 3rd July - Learned about financial and social inter-mediation of Micro-finance Inst...

55th Week@XIMB - 24th June to 30th June, 2012 24th June - Sunday was spent with some business analysis news and listening to Mr. Prabhat Patnaik on the topic "The Perverse Transformation".. Reebok is revamping the branding strategy with an inspiration from the Dominno's Pizza. After all, what was the market for home-delivered pizzas before Domino's began operations? Zero. The most efficient, most productive, more useful aspect of branding is creating a new category. Start something totally new. Hence, the learnings were clear: " Ask not what percentage of an existing market your brand can achieve. Ask how large a market your brand can create by putting resources behind creating a category. " Aditya Birla Nuvo to invest Rs 1,600 crore in Kishore Biyani's Pantaloon Retail. That is a big story to be watched in the coming years. Launched in 1997, the Pantaloon format is spread in 35 cities with 65 stores and 21 factory outlets covering total retail...

54th Week@XIMB - 17th June to 23rd June, 2012 17th June - I started traveling for Bhubaneswar from home. Traveling in the various compartments of the train makes our interaction different class emerging and present in India. A 8 hour journey in jam pack general compartment of the train makes one tough and bares grim reality of poor infrastructure of this developing country. Yet if we can choose, we can live in the world of comforting illusion. 18th June - The train was late in the arrival just by 2 hours. Rain and storm welcomed me back to the educational institute of east India. There was new batch roaming around in XIMB. A new group of budding rural managers were going to start their journey. In my opinion nearly all students who enter this prgramme with a certain amount of idealism and desire to serve the public, but after two years of competition and loan. And slowly everybody care for nothing but the right job with the right company where we all can get in top level manag...