Kerala’s new funda: Marks for bunking

The latest reason to bunk classes may be the best one yet. Kerala has come out with a study model that allows college students to skip their regular classes if they spend that time working on ‘innovative ideas’.

Updated on: Oct 3, 2012, 24:26:57 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The latest reason to bunk classes may be the best one yet. Kerala has come out with a study model that allows college students to skip their regular classes if they spend that time working on ‘innovative ideas’.

It gets better: Those who transform their ideas into a reality will get 4% grace marks.

Kerala government’s Student Entrepreneurship Policy, the first of its kind in the country, will allow college students to join an incubator — a place where students can shape and market their ideas — and enjoy 20% relaxation in attendance, with 4% marks added to their total score at the end of the academic year.

“We expect this policy will give students time to pursue entrepreneurship and innovation during their studies,” Kerala chief minister Oommen Chandy said.

Students from the rest of the country may soon enjoy the same perks if the department of science and technology has its way.

The department, which has set up the world’s largest telecom incubator in Kochi with help from the private sector, now wants the HRD ministry to suggest the Kerala model to other higher education institutions.

The department plans to start around 100 incubators for sectors such as computing, animation and electronics in the next three years to help young Indians take innovative ideas to the market.

“We already have around 1,000 applications on innovations from college students and companies such as Blackberry are now part of the project,” 28-year-old chief executive officer of Kochi’s incubator Sanjay Vijay Kumar said.

Abhishek Goyal, co-founder of Flipkart, and Sasha Mirchandani, co-founder of venture investment fund Mumbai Angels Network, are working with the government to foster the plan.

“We have opened a Pandora’s Box,” said Mirchandani, adding that the government policy of providing seed money to entrepreneurs would be a “great help”.

In spite of India being the second fastest growing economy, the concept of technology fostering incubators has not picked up so far.

Of about 5,000 incubators in the world, India has only 65 – a stark contrast with China’s 1,000 or US’s 2,000.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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