The Hindu Business Line : Home-truths from PM at ISB

The most evocative part of the PM's speech is his fervent call for ``building a new India — an India, in which the urban-rural divide is no longer a visible one."

To my mind, the best speech that the Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, has delivered since he took over 30 months ago, was when he spoke on the occasion of the 50 anniversary celebrations of the Indian School of Business (ISB) at Hyderabad on December 5. The full text is available at the School Web site and anyone who wants to benefit from a crystal clear exposition of what the vision for India should be and how a business school in India should get attuned to that vision should heed the home truths contained in that speech.

Essentially, his theme is the need for an `Indian idiom' in management education in order that Indian problems are looked at from the Indian perspective for finding India-specific solutions, drawing on the country's rich diversity and social and cultural attributes. ``Grassroots experience should inform management concepts, so that new management techniques can transform grassroots practices.''

He firmly tells the ISB ``to avoid the mistake of re-inventing the wheel in terms of ideas and institutions'' and direct their efforts towards retaining and incorporating the relevant wisdom of the past into new methodologies of change.

Fervent call

His address, aimed at an elitist audience at a business school, appropriately focusses on Rural India whose production, financing, marketing and logistics potential cannot be fully realised except by means of ``new innovative approaches, new tools of analysis and new solutions''. He cautions the ISB which was at that time hosting a Global Logistics Summit not to think that logistics is only about time and space, or about the mechanics of movement of goods and people.

``We need to have a logistics model that reaches out to the potential in rural India, a model which delivers goods and services there in a cost effective manner, a model which provides cost effective access for rural produce to our urban, industrial markets (and) can play a key role in integrating rural and urban India, contributing both to employment creation and income generation.''

The most evocative part of his speech is his fervent call for ``building a new India — an India, in which the urban-rural divide is no longer a visible one. An India in which our farming community can rub shoulders with corporate India, and feel an equal in the process of wealth creation. An India in which our rural citizens have the same quality of life as those living in cities.''

Passé, blasé

Management institutions in India are prone to fall for ``ideas and models that may have been developed to deal with more universal urban management situations'' without reference to the talents and capabilities of the people living in the rural area. They also face the danger of being infected by the deadly virus of snobbery and smugness; because of this, they fail, over the years, to make the grade in sustained pursuit of excellence by constantly renewing themselves, and suffer a decline in quality and credibility.

Anything to do with grass roots and ``farmyard noises'' is unglamorous in their eyes compared with resoundingly grandiose projects even if they duplicated what already existed. For this tendency one did not need to go far to find examples. ISB's own Centres for Entrepreneurship Development, Analytical Finance, Global Logistics and Manufacturing Strategies, IT and Networked Economies, Leadership and Change Management, and Strategic Marketing are all passé and blasé when viewed against the Prime Minister's earnest down-to-earth expostulation.

In this light, to what extent, the Prime Minister's words fell on fertile soil is anybody's guess.

B. S. RAGHAVAN