NEW DELHI: The foreign office is on an "outreach" mission as a new programme,
SAMEEP, aims to take Indian foreign policy and its global engagements to students across the country.
The
ministry of external affairs has asked all its officers on leave to travel to their hometowns and particularly their alma mater. Their job would be to engage students in the schools and colleges in the jobs that the ministry is engaged in, so as to give them a fair idea of how India engages with the world, what are its foreign policy priorities and how diplomacy is actually conducted. The programme is voluntary and gives officials the option of going back to their alma mater or to any school or college in their hometown.
The ministry would give them a standardized presentation and officials would be free to improvise and add their personal experiences. The idea is not only to get the ordinary student to take an interest in India's place in the world and its global ambitions, but also to look at diplomacy as a career option. A similar programme has had IAS officers also going back to the place of their first posting to assess its development and make recommendations.
The MEA programme even crowd-sourced its name from the My Gov portal, out of 550 entries. 'SAMEEP -
Students and MEA Engagement Programme' is very much like the long acronyms which PM
Modi uses to name various government programmes.
The objective "is to familiarise school and college students in India about the functioning of the MEA, as well as introducing them to the key elements of India's foreign policy and its success stories. We want to engage with the youth at the grassroot level," said MEA spokesperson
Raveesh Kumar.
"MEA had also started an interactive program on social media called "ask the spokesperson" answering questions from anyone on aspects of Indian foreign policy," Kumar added.
On Tuesday, he said, the program focused on the India-Asean commemorative summit to be held in New Delhi in January.
External affairs minister Sushma Swaraj with foreign secretary S Jaishankar. (File photo by Sanjeev Rastogi)
