Prof APJ Abdul Kalam

I am convinced that I chose the right electives for this term (I already mentioned about one of those electives here). I hope to share the learnings and new insights from these electives in due course in this forum. This post is me going gaga about one elective that we could have almost missed but then got it as an audit course.

GRIT – Globalising and Resurgent India through Innovative Transformation – as an elective was not offered initially to PGPX. Due to the perseverence of our Academic Reps (Thanks once again – Rishi and Sriram), this elective was made available to us as an audit course (means that the details of this course and the grades obtained will not be mentioned in our certificate. But, I don’t mind).

Keen Listening and Keen preparation (Photo by Peyush Agarwal)

This course offers a chance for us to learn and contemplate about inclusive growth for India (growth and prosperity that reaches both the haves and the have not’s, of both the urban and the rural), how to get the maximum mileage out of Innovations at grassroot level, how to ensure Peace within the country and with its neighbours etc. There are a series of lectures, assignments, field visit to Villages and Project work. The project ideas should be defined around the Ten Pillars of India 2020 as visualized by Dr APJ Abdul Kalam – India’s ex-President.

And yes, one of the key things about this subject is that it is handled by Dr Abdul Kalam – Ex-President of India –  and Prof Anil Gupta. Two men full of energy and with a very positive outlook about our country and its people and the future. Inspite of the huge workload involved, the course contents interested me and I did not want to lose an opportunity to contemplate and register my thoughts on a prosperous India.

Earlier, Prof Kalam had given us an assignment (via email) requesting our views on eradicating the poverty in India and the current state of Indian politics. We submitted our individual responses (I had provided couple of my responses here). Dr Kalam’s classes started on 29th Sep and in his first speech he highlighted few of the ideas that were submitted and my idea on poverty eradication was one among them (Link to the speech). The full list of lectures delivered can be found here.

Our group has taken up a project to suggest Improvement ideas for the NREGA project. To put it in a nutshell, currently NREGA offers only menial work but not mind work. We plan to analyze as to why not mind work, why not training, why not knowledge assimilation etc. can be provided via NREGA. We gave a presentation to the Professors and they were impressed with the project. Now the challenge is to meet both the high expectations of both the Professors.

Presentation to Dr Kalam on NREGA project (Photo by Amlan Das)

It was indeed an unique experience to enter our classroom via security channels and to have chit chat with the ex-President in the corridor during the Tea breaks. At the end of all, Prof Kalam gave us a quiz too!!