The paper reviews the state of rural management education in India. Using the setting up of the Institute of Rural Management Anand [IRMA] as a pivot, the paper examines the difficulties in establishing specialized management schools, the design of the curriculum and the management of the expectations of both the students who come in and the recruiters. It then identifies the problems in running rural management programmes particularly the dilemma between explicit value orientation towards the betterment of the poor and the value neutral optimization approach of conventional management education. The paper then examines the paradigm shift that has happened in the marketplace for rural managers, and concludes with some further questions on how the future of rural management education can be addressed.