"Business Blasters" - The Next Big Thing?

Delhi government's Business Blasters programme launched in September in all its schools as part of the Entrepreneurship Mindset Curriculum (EMC) is receiving encouraging responses from students, who are coming up with many practical and innovative business ideas. The government also launched a TV show and a website where students may pitch their projects to investors.

Every school has a "business coach" appointed for guiding the students and teaching them the basics of entrepreneurship and marketing. Apart from this, seed capital of Rs. 2000 was given to approximately 3.5 lakh students as part of this programme. The investment approximately amounts to Rs. 60 crores for this initiative. This initiative is for the students currently in classes 11-12 in Delhi government schools.

While an amount of Rs. 2000 may seem very small for this, it is a step in the right direction. Students have come up with never thought of before ideas that can change the shape of the nation. While a team pitched an idea of an affordable automated wheelchair to the investors and got an investment of 1.5 Lakhs from the investors, another team found a caffeine-free alternative of coffee in date seeds and got an additional investment of 75000 from the investors. What's more fascinating is each project was done by the students in the vicinity of their homes.

This small step from the Delhi government will go a long way in promoting entrepreneurship and innovation in our country, which is currently lacking in each college curriculum. Giving money to innocent students may seem like a far fetched idea but it is a step in the right direction to help them learn the practicalities which can never be learnt from books. As rightly said by the Deputy CM, "The students will learn new things either way. If they fail, they learn and if they pass, they learn too."

The tagline, "Ab bache naukri dhoodne waalee nahi, naukri dene waale banenege (Students will not look for jobs, but will create jobs)", resonates with the main idea of the initiative and very beautifully captures how this will benefit the students. Moreover, the government plans to motivate the students to carry forward their projects and help them later on as well so that the ideas do not get left behind as mere school projects.

On one side of the country, you have 18 crore people who sleep without food every day and then you have unemployed youth from food, science and agriculture universities. We do not have a scarcity of farmland and resources but what is missing is the mindset for change and innovation. This initiation will work to abridge what is currently missing.

The lacklustre approach of the government till now towards entrepreneurship and innovation has led our country to produce more and more workers and not leaders or founders. This may seem paradoxical because our country produces a large number of unicorns each year. But, these unicorns are one-off cases and do not present the true potential of our country's human capital resources. If this human capital is tapped well, as seen in the case of Business Blasters, we can move towards becoming a superpower in the world. What needs changing is also the mindset with which people see entrepreneurship and anything innovative. The words associated with the same are risk & loss, due to which even those who have brilliant ideas are demotivated to not pursue them. We need to bring about a change in this and look towards these domains as the way forward for the building of our nation.