Giving young India a foothold into the future

The leading lights of India Inc have joined hands with the Centre to improve the career prospects of bright young people from rural India. In a public-private partnership effort to be shortly announced, foundations run by many top corporate houses will fund the coaching of school-leaving rural youth to prepare them for technical entrance exams. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Aug 15, 2009, 02:41:15 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The leading lights of India Inc have joined hands with the Centre to improve the career prospects of bright young people from rural India.

In a public-private partnership effort to be shortly announced, foundations run by Wipro chief Azim Premji, Sunil Mittal’s Bharti Group and others corporate chiefs will fund the coaching of school-leaving rural youth to prepare them for engineering, medical and other technical entrance examinations.

Around 4,000 youth will be selected every year, comprising the top 10 per cent of students who pass out of the Jawahar Navodaya Vidalayas (JNV) — the network of 576 schools across the country set up to promote quality education in the rural areas.

Functioning in almost every district of the country, JNVs reserve three-fourths of their seats for rural students.
“We want the private sector to increase its contribution to inclusive education through this new partnership,” Kapil Sibal, Human Resource Development Minister, told Hindustan Times.

An HRD official, who requested anonymity, revealed that the coaching would cost around Rs 15,000 per student.
The government and the private sector may share the cost equally — the details are still being worked out — but those selected will not have to pay a paisa.

“The training will be for admission to the IITs and institutes teaching other new emerging disciplines,” he said.

A spokesperson for the Azim Premji Foundation, when contacted, refused to comment but said the foundation already had several such partnerships with various state governments.

The proposal was discussed in detail at a meeting between Sibal and Planning Commission deputy chairperson Montek Singh Ahluwalia earlier this week.

“Such a move will be a big boost to JNV’s success story,” said MS Khanna, joint commissioner with Navodaya Vidalaya Samiti, the body that runs the schools.

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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