Replicating
the Anand Pattern of Cooperatives, across India, under
Operation Flood required a large number
of suitably trained young people into their management cadres. The supply of
graduates from India’s then existing schools of management was too small to
fill this demand; in any case, very few of those graduates were motivated to
work for cooperatives.
To
serve this need, if Dr Kurien had simply chosen to expand the capacity of NDDB’s
Management Training Cell and / or sponsor a Centre for Cooperative Management
in one of the IIMs, my career would have moved along a different path. Instead
he chose to set up the Institute of Rural Management Anand (IRMA), visualizing the necessity of a new discipline called “rural
management”. Till then, as a norm, “business” pre-fixed “management” and
“development” suffixed “rural”!
To
me, a firm believer in the power of “and” versus the tyranny of “or”, this new
fusion concept appealed instantly, and I decided that IRMA would be the place
for me as I finish my under-graduation the following year (1981). That even the
first batch of IRMA didn’t graduate yet, or that the very discipline wasn’t defined
well, added to the lure!
In
a 1980 seminal paper, titled “A New Institute of Rural Management – And a New Developmental Discipline?”, Dr Michael Halse, then a Food and Agriculture Organisation Advisor with the National Dairy Development Board wrote that “the rural manager’s tasks consist of dealing
simultaneously with a series of interacting systems: (a) the social and
institutional system whereby humans relate to each other, formally and
informally; (b) the physical and technical systems, whereby man exists within
the biosphere and practices agriculture in order to manipulate these systems to
human advantage, and (c) the economic systems whereby humans exchange the
fruits of each other’s labours and (if they are lucky) save and invest in order
to improve their lives in future times.”
He
argued that “the practice of rural management requires sensitivity to the
priorities and needs of the society, dominated as it is by the culture of
poverty.” “The study and teaching of rural management as a discipline must
grasp, and adapt for its purposes, modern management’s observational skills,
analytical techniques and decision making practices, applying them innovatively
to the tasks of rural development and the elimination of rural poverty.”
I
am sure, all that Dr Halse had to do, while writing this paper, was to
reproduce Dr Kurien in action, into words…
After
passing out of IRMA in 1983, I joined Gujarat Cooperative Oilseeds Growers’
Federation (GROFED), promoted by NDDB under a project to restructure the oilseeds & edible oils sector replicating the Anand Pattern of cooperatives.
After
spending nearly seven years in GROFED, I came to the conclusion that Anand
Pattern was not going to work in the oilseeds sector because the market dynamics
were very different from those of milk. I moved out of the cooperative sector,
and joined ITC which had just diversified into the branded edible oils
business. Thereafter, I met Dr Kurien only occasionally during my infrequent
visits to IRMA or NDDB; I was an “unwelcome guest”, having moved to the
corporate sector…
Years
later, with the conceptualisation of eChoupal within ITC, I became a “complete defector” because this model
goes against two of the core tenets of the Anand Pattern viz. (1) farmer owned
enterprise controlling the whole value chain, and (2) eliminating the middlemen
to directly connect the farmer and the consumer.
ITC
eChoupal is not owned by farmers in “form”, but, as an organization that can
thrive only by being ultra-responsive to the farmers’ needs, it delivers similar
outcomes for the farmers. And, that, without the limitations imposed by a typical
“democracy in practice”! In fact, the eChoupal tag line “Kisano ke hith mein,
kisano ka apnaa”, is inspired by Bhola’s (Naseeruddin Shah) dialogue from
Manthan, “Yeh sisoty apdi cheh” (this is our society)
ITC
eChoupal does recognize that the middlemen are bad, but more importantly, also
recognizes that they provide crucial linkages along the value chain in an
economy where the required institutional infrastructure is absent. Leveraging the
unique capabilities of these middlemen, yet disintermediating them from the
transmission of information flow & market signals was at the core of
eChoupal model that empowers the famers.
Two
years after eChoupal was launched, I got a chance to meet Dr Kurien at an event
in Delhi, where we were co-panelists, and I could share these perspectives with
him. Not only did he appreciate the insights and the nuances of our business
model, but he immediately allowed ITC eChoupal to recruit IRMA graduates from
the campus, otherwise reserved for select partner organizations.
A
few more years later, in 2007, this news item in Business Standard marked a
high point in my career as a rural manager: “Nandan Nilekani of Infosys
and S Sivakumar of ITC rub shoulders with Mohammad Yunus and Verghese Kurien as
messiahs of development in a new report on poverty alleviation penned by the
World Bank”
With
the passing away of Dr Kurien yesterday, I lost a valued guru; but the spirit
of his idea - ‘enterprise as a solution to poverty alleviation’ - remains an
inspiration to me to innovate different institutional forms to suit diverse
contexts of rural India.
