The Hindu Business Line : IRMAns on Jatra

It had been a week of learning with fun for students of the Institute of Rural Management, Anand (IRMA) as `Jatra', the week-long annual festival of the institute drew to an end.

The nine-day internal festival of IRMA started on March 4 with the late-night `Jatra Run' in which the entire institute joined in with burning torches. The main events started from March 5 with competitions like Hard Sell, Hunt for Steel Baron and International Trade Game being kicked off. The games had been devised by the students to employ all the learning the students had gathered as part of their curriculum. The Hunt involved teams from the seven hostel blocks devising merger and acquisition strategies, managing and growing their steel business based on ever-changing parameters and using their skills in the futures and money markets to build a virtual steel empire.

Similarly, the Trade Game involved teams representing different countries trying to forge preferential trade tie-ups with each other in the face of competition. It used the Game Theory on how countries behave. Apart from different games and competitions, one block had set up a food stall that served breakfast to dinner each day. Along with cooking, students from the block managed marketing, service and accounting for the stall. The event was one of the rare occasions when both the batches of the Institute were on campus together. A new factor this year has been a much greater involvement of alumni as a large number of former students had come down to the campus to share their experiences of working life.