Gunvant M Desai

Gunvant M Desai, fondly known as GM, passed away on 28 April in Rockville, Maryland in the United States. GM was one of the five founding faculty members of the Centre for Management in Agriculture (CMA) at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIMA).

My association with GM goes back to 1977 when he offered me a job as a faculty member at the CMA after I completed my PhD. GM repeatedly told me that the work at IIMA and in particular at CMA was based on four equally important pillars. The fi rst pillar was “to learn by doing research”. This idea of learning by doing research was attractive for a new faculty member like me who had no field experience of agriculture in India prior to joining IIMA. In order to learn about Indian agriculture GM advised me to do research in one of the important commodities, namely cotton, in Vidarbha and Saurashtra.