Chepuri (left) with Yechury

Ahmedabad, Feb. 25: A “Che” has nudged a leading Marxist and India’s premier B-school a little closer to putting their heads together on the common man’s problems.

IIM (Ahmedabad) student Chepuri Sri Krishna has persuaded the institute into including in its curriculum a project where students advise MPs on development issues in their constituencies.

Chepuri says CPM politburo member Sitaram Yechury has agreed to send a query relating to development in Bengal — the state that sent him to the Rajya Sabha — for the students to work on.

The young man had come up with the idea sometime after doing his summer internship last year at the CPM headquarters — an unconventional choice for an Indian Institute of Management student.

“Some of my friends had warned that I would be branded a communist and my career prospects would suffer,” the second-year student in his early 30s said. But Chepuri, deeply impressed by Yechury during a seminar at his institute, decided to go ahead.

Last month, he travelled to Delhi again to meet Yechury and explained his idea and the CPM leader agreed to help, he said.

From the next academic session, the IIM will include the “contact with leaders” project among the optional projects in the second-year MBA course.

MPs will be invited to send “problem themes”, such as how to spend their local area development funds or how to improve investment opportunities in their constituencies. The students, assisted by professors Anil Gupta and Navdeep Mathur, will study them and try and work out solutions.

Chepuri will have completed his course by then and taken up a job, but has promised to help with his inputs, especially on whatever problem Yechury suggests. He says he might make a “field trip” to Bengal if needed.

“I want to liaise between the CPM and IIM Ahmedabad. The internship with the party broadened my vision,” said the young man who had, before leaving for Delhi last April, confessed he knew very little about the original Che, the iconic Argentine revolutionary.

Yechury told The Telegraph he wanted “an institutional structure that will allow students from premier institutes to take part in the social agenda of the country”.

“For instance, MPs get funds under the MPLAD scheme, and the management students can give their inputs for certain projects, such as setting up a drinking water plant and managing it effectively,” he said.

But he added that the IIM Ahmedabad project should not be an “individual-based project but implemented in an institutionalised manner”.

Yechury said he had seen students from premier B-schools and the National Law School, Bangalore, take a keen interest in social projects during his lecture tours.

He had spoken about this to Speaker Somnath Chatterjee, and the Lok Sabha secretariat had taken out an advertisement offering internship stints to management students.

Che, an IIT Mumbai graduate, believes the “contact with leaders” project will give students invaluable understanding of what he calls “ground realities”.

He has set up a “public policy special interest group” of students and teachers at the IIM, which will encourage students to do their internships with political parties.

(With inputs from our Delhi bureau)