Nurturing innovation culture in our education environment

Innovation is not just about putting forth a new idea, but rather taking that idea to its logical end that culminates in bringing value to targeted beneficiaries. Inculcation and nurturing a spirit of innovation is in fact critically important for a nation to lead in creation of technology products ahead of others and thereby stay ahead in the global market competition. We Indians are usually great in producing ideas, but our socio-cultural attributes usually tend to become hurdles in translation of ideas to technology products. We thus need to create and nurture a conducive ambiance to strengthen the spirit of enquiry and address curiosity, inculcate a culture of group working/research particularly among people with diverse but complimentary capabilities, nurture open minded respect for lateral thinking etc., through our education system. This should help getting over our silo mind sets that are so prevalent.

To address this important issue, two initiatives of Rajiv Gandhi Science and Technology Commission (RGSTC), one for school children and the other for students of engineering colleges, seem to have taken roots.

1)          Establishment of Science, Innovation and Activity Centres (SIACs)

Facilities that enable children to experience fun based on scientific principles, help trigger interest in science. Models and displays that help understanding of the embedded principles through hands on efforts and scientific discussion help children address their curiosity. Experimentation with equipment both predesigned as well as custom made with one’s own hands, nurtures a spirit of scientific enquiry and practical hands on skills necessary for innovation. Availability of facilities that enable such an experience for our school children should be an important part of our efforts to shape our generation next. The challenge is to create such facilities that can cater to the needs of vast majority of students. We have a few Science Centres at the national and regional level. These are large facilities and have impacted a significant number of children, those who are able to access such centres. However, such facilities cannot be accessed by a large fraction of our children due to resource limitations. On the other end of the spectrum, several people have created small low cost kits/facilities and are reaching them to different schools. These kits do facilitate better insights into related scientific principles particularly because of hands on activity that gets supported through such an effort. They can be deployed on a scale large enough to impact practically every child. They however cannot generate the fun and awe part of the experience that the larger science centres trigger. 

RGSTC has therefore launched a scheme to create midsized SIACs that have all critical attributes of a science centre and can be set up in collaboration with larger well established education institutions and sustained by them. The facilities would be available to all students in the neighborhood in a time sharing mode. There would also be facilities to engage children in ‘jod-tod fod’ mode as well as in a class room mode on curricular and co-curricular science topics through well-equipped audio-visual facilities.

Two such centres, one at Pravaranager and the other at Warananagar have been commissioned. Two more at Satara and Amaravati have been taken up for construction. Expectation is to have at least one such facility in every district.

Institutions like National Council of Science Museums (NCSM), Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education (HBCSE), Muktangan Exploratory Science Centre, Vidnyan Ashram are actively supporting this effort along with the concerned host institutions.

2)          RGSTC-TIFAC MSME internship

Science and technology is at the core of national development and competitive capability. Thus while there is a case for increasing our investment in S&T to at least 2% of our GDP from around 0.8% presently, we must also remain concerned about the efficiency of use of our investment for realizing the intended outcome in terms of development and economic growth. Apart from our progress in S&T and relevant translational efforts, this would also need inculcation of a spirit of innovation among our youth. Our youth should therefore be exposed to hands on opportunity to develop ideas to address challenges before our industry and implement them.

MSMEs represent one of the largest employment generators and foreign exchange earners. The older ones among them usually have issues of technology obsolescence with a little ability to rejuvenate their technology due to financial constraints. Their problems usually are well within the capability of engineering students.

While we have a large capacity for undergraduate engineering education, only a small fraction of this capacity is at a reasonable level of excellence. By and large there is a serious quality issue with respect to engineering education in India. A large fraction of graduating students is found to be unemployable and the seats in many engineering colleges remain vacant leading to moves for their closure. While poorly performing engineering colleges must close down, creating opportunities for students to solve real life industry problems under the guidance of their teachers and industry professionals would go a long way in improving the capability of our engineering college students in rest of the institutions thereby contributing to an important dimension related to engineering skills and innovation.

There is thus a strong case for bringing MSMEs and engineering education institutions together in a win-win mode through an internship program for engineering college students at MSMEs for solving their real life problems. Such a scheme has been initiated by Technology Information, Forecasting and Assessment Council (TIFAC). The scheme has been replicated in Maharashtra by Rajiv Gandhi Science and Technology Commission (RGSTC). Under the scheme, in the first phase, 30 students in batches of two each spend two months with a MSME to identify a problem that the industry would want them to solve and work out a roadmap for the purpose. These 15 proposals, which must aim at solving the problem in a period of six months, are evaluated by a committee and two or three best proposals are selected for the actual implementation in the second phase with a financial support of up to Rs. one lakh. Students get a modest stipendiary support during both phases of the scheme.

The scheme is currently being implemented in two engineering colleges in the State with a high level of enthusiasm on part of both the college/students as well as the industries. I only hope that the scheme is universally implemented. The expenditure is well worth it as the students benefit from actual hands on industry experience and the industry which any way needs to be supported, benefits in the form of technology inputs corresponding to one engineer year effort with a small financial aid.