The Xavier School of Rural Management (XSRM), which offers an MBA in Rural Management under Xavier University Bhubaneswar (previously XIMB-RM), successfully completed its placement process for the batch of 2016-18. The programme provides an ‘MBA-plus’ orientation, which goes above and beyond the standard management curriculum to develop ethically responsible and value driven professionals with an extensive understanding of the rural context, communities, markets and opportunities.
XSRM is the first school under XUB to have successfully achieved a 100 per cent placement for the Rural Management batch of 2016-18.
Students bagged a multitude of roles encompassing all the sectors like Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI), Development, Consultancy, FMCG, Marketing and Commodity, amongst others, offered by the 33 companies that participated in the process. The present trend of placements highlighted a revival of financial inclusion with agri-finance and micro-finance sectors emerging as the highest recruiters, attracting about one-fourth of the graduating batch. Along with the regular recruiters of the RM program in XUB, such as Amul , Deloitte and ICICI Bank, among others, several new companies showed a keen interest in the batch, such as Coromandel, Fullerton, Muthoot Fincorp and ORMAS, to name a few.
The highest domestic salary offered was ₹13.75 Lakhs per annum, offered by Deloitte.
This year, the highest package was offered by the Consulting and Research sector, where highly coveted job profiles in the Government, utilities, infrastructure and development and research were proposed by companies such as Deloitte, Sambodhi and Quess Corp.
FMCG engaged 9 per cent of the batch with job offers coming from companies such as Cargill, AMUL, and Coromandel.
The highest number of job offers was made by the BFSI sector in a number of rewarding profiles in rural lending and financial inclusion to roughly 49 per cent of the batch. Some of the major recruiters were ICICI Bank, TATA AIG General Insurance, Ujjivan Small Finance Bank, Spandana Spoorthy and Muthoot Fincorp.
There has clearly been an overall increase in the remuneration offered and the number of students recruited in comparison to the last academic year. A large chunk of the success of a Rural Management programme is highlighted by the number of students intending to opt for offers from organisations that operate at the grassroots level. This was fulfilled by some of the reputed organisations known for their operations in the development sector like PRADAN, Basix, Bihar Rural Livelihood Promotion Society, Dilasa Janvikas Pratishthan and Odisha Livelihood Mission (OLM), which recruited 15 per cent of the batch.
Further, the programme witnessed allied companies within the development landscape, such as Odisha Rural Development and Marketing Society (ORMAS), Feedback Electricity Distribution Company Ltd. (FEDCO) and National Agricultural Cooperative Marketing Federation of India Ltd. (NAFED) making offers in the marketing and co-operatives domain.