That entrepreneurship is not just for students in engineering and IT-related streams will be the State government’s message as it kick starts an ‘Innovation Yatra’ across campuses from next month. As part of this campaign, officials and innovators will sow the entrepreneurship seeds to promote startup culture.
The yatra will cover 20 colleges in rural and semi-urban areas where students, teachers and parents are rarely exposed to entrepreneurship. The Telangana State Council of Higher Education (TSCHE) has written to colleges seeking interest for the yatra; only a few have responded so far. The yatra will cover the interested colleges first.
Phanindra Sama, Chief Innovation Officer, TS government, said several innovators are left out if the focus is only on engineering and this yatra will touch colleges outside the engineering stream. “Entrepreneurship Labs that are supposed to be mandatory on campuses are just name boards in many colleges with no infrastructure or support system. During the yatra, effort will be to revive them and make the stakeholders understand the deeper benefits of it,” he said.
Mr. Phanindra, who is also the founder of the Red Bus, feels parents’ mentality needs to be changed first. “Innovation and how to be an innovator should be dining table discussion. That is how negativity around being an entrepreneur can be driven away,” he added.
An internal study, he revealed, has found that students in majority of the colleges cannot even identify successful entrepreneurs: “When we showed them logos of about 20 highly successful startups, most of them could identify only Flipkart. They couldn’t recognise even a highly successful player like Sunil Bharti Mittal.” However, he doesn’t fault students for the situation. Introducing innovators, entrepreneurs and interactions with successful players will change the attitude, he feels. “Ideas will be generated but there is a need for a platform for students to think differently and instil in the, that innovation is part of their learning,” he said.
TSCHE Chairman T. Papi Reddy said they are making efforts to identify teachers who can motivate students to think out of the box.