Working Papers

Professionalisation of management is considered to be an important solution to many of the ills of the co-operatives. Enhancing the professional skills of co-operatives is a challenging task given the complex socio-economic milieu in which the co-operatives are placed. Institute of Rural Management, Anand (IRMA) was set up with the purpose of meeting the professional managerial needs of the co-operatives. The present paper is an attempt to assess the role of IRMA in professionalising the farmersa?? co-operatives through the instrument of training. The paper is based on the available published and unpublished documents/studies about IRMA. The analysis reveals that in its attempt to address the challenge, irma has come up with broadly two types of training programmes. One is the two-year post-graduate programme in rural management (PRM) meant for training and injecting young and talented professionals into the co-operatives. Second is the training programmes meant for upgrading the professional skills of the in-service personnel of the co-operatives. While both types of training programmes have been well conceived, the success in terms of their outreach and targeting, the primary requirement for making any visible impact on professionalisation, seems to be much higher in the case of in-service training programmes than the prm. Though prm has been able to produce high quality rural management graduates, their absorption and retention by the co-operative sector is found to be very limited. On the other hand, the in-service training programmes including the one year programme (oyp) show a relatively better performance. The paper examines the reasons for varying performance and suggests that success in addressing the challenge depends to a great extent on attaining a proper match between the need and realities of the co-operatives and the design of the training programmes.