Orientation Camp @ IIITA Prayagraj, U.P. Bharat

Prof. Milind Sudhakar Marathe

  KJSCE, Mumbai     

If we minutely go through the National Education Policy, we readily understand that in essence this policy is made to produce students with new motivation and enlightenment not only for their own brilliant career but also to cater to the service of Atma-Nirbhar Bharat and Global humanity. The churned words of this policy are: "holistic learning", "driving out examination related fear", "gaining multidisciplinary innovative skills" and "instilling nationalistic mindset". Through a little brainstorming on these issues we can understand that these policies lead to production of new self-reliant and bright students with high innovative skills to contribute to their as well as national and global well-being. However, for the fulfillment of all these criteria we need to look way behind to find the Gurukula system in the past that had all these ingredients. Way forward to the current scenario, we obviously need something that can serve as equivalent to this Gurukula system using the same current infrastructure with minimum disturbance to the existing academic framework. Towards this direction, the effort put by the Indian Institute of Information Technology (Allahabad), Prayagraj to start a new compulsory semester course, 'Orientation Camp' appears to fulfill all these aspects of National Education Policy. As for the beginning, it was not clear how can this 'camp'-mode course be conducted within the pandemic condition and without the physical presence of the students. In this regard, I am overwhelmed with the robust online framework arranged by this institute to make this program so successful that it becomes a life-time experience for me to think and also to put an effort to imitate it in other institutes and universities. Therefore I hope that after successful completion of this course, we will surely get students with illustrious backgrounds both in their career and in contributing to build an Atma-Nirbhar Bharat. I am sure with this effort IIITA is going to create a fresh bunch of goodwill ambassadors for Bharat and the whole world with the perpetual mission of "Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam". I wish IIITA all the success in this endeavour.

(Prof. Milind Sudhakar Marathe)