New Delhi: Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal on Wednesday for the first time joined government school students in an online interaction aimed at promoting entrepreneurship.
Kejriwal was joined by deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia and Arjun Malhotra, who co-founded the HCL group.
The CM told students how the 71-year-old entrepreneur and industrialist is a qualified engineer from IIT-Kharagpur, the institute from which Kejriwal had himself graduated in 1989.
While the entrepreneurship interaction programme has been on since 2018, this was Kejriwal’s first experience, he said.
“We believe the people of our country are very intelligent. We are full of ideas and have a brilliant entrepreneurship mindset. A rickshaw puller is an entrepreneur, so is a betel leaf seller. Every citizen of this country knows how to run a business. But there is some problem with our education system. The moment we graduate from our school, we start looking out for jobs. We want to change this mindset. We want that while being in school, our students should start thinking in a direction where they do not have to find a job after leaving school, rather they should start thinking about their business propositions,” Kejriwal told students during the interaction that was live-streamed on the party’s social media handles.
Sisodia said, “After the Corona crisis subsides, a variety of new opportunities will arise in the field of entrepreneurship. Three years ago, CM Sir (referring to Kejriwal) and I interacted with a few IIT students. Most of them praised our work done in the field of science and thanked us for their improved science laboratories. But at the same time, they requested us to emphasise more on English. Learning any language is a skill, but our mother tongue Hindi is our pride. We should not feel shy to speak in our mother tongue.”
{{/usCountry}}Sisodia said, “After the Corona crisis subsides, a variety of new opportunities will arise in the field of entrepreneurship. Three years ago, CM Sir (referring to Kejriwal) and I interacted with a few IIT students. Most of them praised our work done in the field of science and thanked us for their improved science laboratories. But at the same time, they requested us to emphasise more on English. Learning any language is a skill, but our mother tongue Hindi is our pride. We should not feel shy to speak in our mother tongue.”
{{/usCountry}}Interacting with students of classes 9-12, Malhotra said, “Behind any successful person is his value system. It is his value system that takes that person to different levels. I wanted to go to NASA and become a researcher after IIT. But since I got a job in the Delhi Cloth Mills, I did not go. Later, we left our job to make computer microprocessors and formed our company.”