The youth of India does not lack entrepreneurial zeal; they have an exceedingly unexplored potential for working towards innovation, development and improvement of products, processes and services, with a scalable business model and a high potential of employment generation or wealth creation. Coupled with this is the fact that startup recognition by the Government of India (GOI) is going at an aggressive rate. Sustenance Allowance, Marketing Assistance, Incubation facilities and so on are being provided as part of elaborate GOI policy framework by various states.

I love the fact that the students now love to show me things they’ve made even outside of my sessions…

The whole strength of this mission lies in - catching’em young! HOW? Well, not so difficult. There is already a gigantic populace out there of school-going children with minds full of creative energy. All we need is to channelize and harness the same. Atal Innovation Mission (AIM) is aiming to do just that. It is programmed to involve volunteers, who as Mentors of Change (MOC), pass on their knowledge, expertise and zeal to young school children through a series of mentoring sessions. Based on their experience and qualification, the MOCs can mentor the mentees with digital literacy, Ideation, Design Thinking, Computational Thinking or Physical Computing and so on.

I became a part of the mission as Design Thinking mentor, over a year ago. Since then, barring a few inevitable breaks, I find myself every week surrounded by about 40 bundles of energy who are curious, bubbly, irritated, bored, excited all at the same time! With my weekly visits to the school I am assigned, I have managed to overcome, more or less, the initial resistance, apprehension, smirks and so on of all involved. Now instead of me badgering with messages and phone calls all the time for fixing my visit, the ATL in-charge school teacher also sometimes calls me to inquire about my visit.

After a heart to heart talk with them for a bit, the girls had no inhibitions in writing their innermost concerns and sharing with me…

The groups of young girls aged 11 to 17 who’ve met me on my numerous visits have listened patiently to what I do and what I aspire for them to do. They’ve enjoyed a couple of TED talk shows videos projected from my laptop in the ATL lab. They’ve responded with great energy in frequent brainstorming sessions regarding reuse and recycling of waste. Like a close friend they’ve shared their deepest of concerns with me. They’ve written, drawn, and materialized their ideas in the form of actual prototypes and models when posed with a specific problem.

From sticking out only with their own close group of friends, there was an eagerness to join with strangers to accomplish the task at hand.

The students have learnt to present their ideas by talking in front of an audience about their writing, drawing or objects they produce amongst peer groups. It gives me immense satisfaction to witness their creative potential and they go back confident and full of a sense of achievement looking back at their creations. We have sometimes been very liberal in our choices about what we want to do in a particular session, while sometimes we have followed the ‘Monthly Theme’ given by the AIM Team from NITI Aayog. Either ways, we have managed to do enough to justify our time together. I can say this because every time I leave at the end of a session at school, the girls come surrounding me asking- “Ma’am, ab kab aayengi aap?” (When will you visit again?) The key attributes that I have observed grow in the budding entrepreneurs as they have been on board with me are: 1. Teamwork
2. Responsibility
3. Public Speaking
4. Self-esteem
5. Confidence
6. Patriotism
7. Worldly awareness
8. Creativity
9. Lateral thinking

One session was devoted to girls introspecting and figuring out what their personalities could be compared with. They were asked to represent the same graphically and then tell their friends what they were and why…