University of Chicago Center's IIC fellowship enables students to use their education and ideas to make measurable difference in society
The University of Chicago Center in Delhi through the International Innovation Corps (IIC) fellowship programme aims to recruit and train graduate students from any Indian university to work with the government on a development project for a year.
As part of the IIC, graduates from Indian universities are organised into five member teams who are then trained for five weeks. “We try to imbibe in them skills required to translate academic knowledge into on-the-ground contributions. Then each team is embedded with a government official to work on a project,” explains Anup Malani, one of the founders of the programme.
This is the first year of the IIC initiative and three teams of five students each have been assigned different projects. While one team is helping the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor Development Corporation plan in Greater Noida, another team is working with the National Skills Development Corporation to improve local textile production through vocational academies in the Vidarbha, Maharashtra. The third team is helping the Central Electronics Limited to develop a network of organisations to boost indigenous electronics production. “The idea is to provide local governments the human resources and knowledge partners to enable change,” says Malani.
While conducting research on the Indian healthcare scheme, Malani found that government officials faced challenges which could not be tackled alone. “After discussions with fellow founder Sanjay Bhargava, I realised that there were a number of intelligent and motivated graduates in the country and abroad who want to make a direct impact,” says Malani. Malani and Bhargava along with Phoebe Holtzman, a researcher at the University of Chicago conceptualised the IIC which would instigate a culture of innovative problem solving within Indian government institutions.
Although the students have just begun their fellowship, the objective of the programme seems to be quite clear, to use a combination of dedicated government officials in India and students who want to make a difference and develop feasible solutions to problems in rural and urban areas of the country.
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