Prof Jeemol Unni, who had been serving the institute for two years as Reserve Bank of India chair professor for rural economics, has set her eyes on taking IRMA to new heights during her tenure as director of the institute.
The wait is finally over. Set up in 1979, country’s first rural management school — Institute of Rural Management, Anand (IRMA) — got its first woman director on Wednesday as Prof Jeemol Unni took charge of the premier institute.
Prof Unni, who had been serving the institute for two years as Reserve Bank of India chair professor for rural economics, has set her eyes on taking IRMA to new heights during her tenure as director of the institute.
Prof Unni’s husband, also an academician, is a faculty at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A). Prof Unni’s name was announced as director of IRMA on Tuesday after a 3-member search panel, consisting of IIM-A director, Samir Barua and NDDB chairperson, Dr Amrita Patel, also on the board of governors of IIM-A, zeroed in on her.
Talking to DNA, Prof Unni shared her priorities and vision for the premier rural institute. How does she feel being the first woman director of the institute? “Wonderful, as you can imagine,” she says.
Among her aims are expanding IRMA’s reach beyond Gujarat and encouraging more IRMA students to take up entrepreneurship.
Dr Unni has a PhD and MPhil in economics and held visiting fellow positions at Economic Growth Centre, Yale University, Institute of Social Studies, The Hague and International Centre for Research on Women, Washington DC.
Prof Unni said, “Setting up an incubation centre at IRMA for social entrepreneurship is another dream. This would encourage and help students to think and act in the direction of rural entrepreneurship,” she said.
She believes that India is at a stage where setting up more rural management institutes is the need of the day. “Rural management is a field that IRMA has pioneered. To be able to establish it as an important and relevant discipline we do need many more institutes like IRMA.” Ask her about her vision of IRMA and she is quick to say that she wants to see the institute as a knowledge hub. “With the help of our academically strong faculty we hope that IRMA will scale new heights and establish itself as a ‘knowledge institution’ in rural management and development,” she says adding that setting up IRMA campus in other Indian pockets is also on agenda to fulfill sometime in the future.
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