Rural Immersion Programme (RIP) is a part of the course at IIM Indore wherein the students have to visit the villages of Madhya Pradesh in their respective groups of 6 People and stay there for 4 – 5 days in 2nd Term of their First year of MBA Curriculum. This year, It was spread across more than 50 districts, and around 600 students from the PGP Indore Campus, IPM and PGP Mumbai campus were a part of this unique program.
During the course of the programme, students interacted with the villagers and the local administration, filled in surveys forms and tried to understand the social life, Functioning of Administration from Grass root level and aspects of Human Development in these areas.
The main objective of this programme is to provide students with insights into the rural economy and the challenges faced by the people. While the outcomes expected are recommendations for the solutions related to the mission objective.
The Mission of this year RIP was on Open Defecation and sanitation under the Total sanitation campaign. This year the programme was in collaboration with Swachh Bharat Mission, Madhya Pradesh Government, and UNICEF, India.
What we did this year was we were supposed to visit 40 - 50 households including Anganwadis and schools and look for the current state of sanitation and verify the claims of being an open defecation free village, as the village we visited was declared Open Defecation Free.
Our objective was to give recommendations on the long-term sustenance of these toilets and understand the motive of villagers is it their own benefit or monetary incentive from government motivated them to build the toilet?
We also interacted with people who worked hard every day for the common goal of making their village Open Defecation free like Sarpanch, Nigrani Samiti, Anganwadis and got to know the difficulties they faced in spreading awareness about the ill-effects of Open Defecation.
The surveys and interviews conducted across villages, also helped students gain deeper insights into the problems of the rural people, who did not have access to the proper water supply that resulted in greater defecation rates in their own villages. Later, we submitted our report after analysing all the forms and people's responses with recommendations.
This programme became a life-changing experience for the students with takeaways of socio-economic problems that are still prevalent in Indian rural society like illiteracy, poor healthcare, infrastructure, unemployment etc. This programme also gives students a chance to explore the unexplored rural market.
Mahatma Gandhi has truly said “future depends on what you do today” aligning with the same principle, the long-term vision behind initiating Rural Immersion Programme is to sensitize and develop students such that they become socially conscious managers who can work in future towards the collective and inclusive growth of the society.