In July, in Gujarat’s Anand—the milk capital of India—Amit Shah, India’s Minister of Cooperation, laid the foundation stone for one “Tribhuvan” Sahkari University. This was not, technically, a new place. The milk-white buildings were already there: leafy, familiar, the campus of the Institute of Rural Management, or IRMA. But the signboard had changed, and with it, the institution itself.

IRMA, after all, isn’t just another management school. It was founded by Verghese Kurien, the architect of Operation FloodOperation FloodAlso known as White Revolution, Operation Flood was world's largest dairy development program. and the man who made India the world’s largest dairy producer, to train managers for rural India. For decades, it was a boutique school with its own cultivated niche: not IIM-style consultants or bankers, but cooperative managers, NGO leaders, dairy-union professionals. 

Now, by an Act of Parliament, that boutique has been absorbed into a sprawling new university. On paper, IRMA retains its name and autonomy. In reality, it is being reborn. Or, depending on the point of view, erased.

For students, the consequences are immediate: placement seasons that used to be IRMA’s own will now be shared under one large umbrella. For alumni, it’s Kurien’s legacy—once synonymous with the campus—rebranded under another name. And for professors, it’s more schools, more MBAs, more students, but not yet the cushion of more hands to teach. 

The government has already sanctioned three new colleges on IRMA’s 60-acre campus—the School of Agribusiness Management, the School of Cooperative Banking & Finance, and the School of Cooperative Management—with a Rs 500 crore seed fund to get them running.

The plan is to affiliate some 300 small and medium institutions across the country, effectively knitting together a national cooperative education system with IRMA at its centre, Umakant Dash, IRMA’s then director, had saidThe Hindu BusinessLineGovernment of India to pump-in ₹500 crore as Tribhuvan Sahkari University takes shapes in Gujarat in April. That’s an unusually high number for a single university to corral.

As Pankaj Ballabh, an alumnus who spent much of his career in CSR and as a project manager for various NGOs in Rajasthan, puts it: “IRMA could have stayed a rural management institute, with ‘cooperative’ as one among many tools.” But that’s not the vision anymore.