IIT Kharagpur's Entrepreneurship Awareness Drive across 20 cities in 20 days

Entrepreneurship will be a new buzzing word among students across India as IIT Kharagpur is back with Entrepreneurship Awareness Drive [EAD’13] this month. For students, its an opportunity to get exposed to the series of insightful guest lectures and workshops happening in their city.

The EAD is conducted across 20 cities in 20 days in the month of October. Each city plays host to an Entrepreneurship Awareness Camp (EAC), where eminent entrepreneurs and industry leaders counsel students about the pros and cons of entrepreneurship as a career and how it differs from the usual run-of-the-mill job culture that has existed till now. Each EAD also features a networking session, where startups, students and the guests can freely interact as well as a startup pitching session, where the startups attending a session get a one-on-one interaction with the guest lecturers.

EAD has come a long way since its inception 5 years ago and has seen the number of cities grow from 10 to 20, with a footfall of 7,550 in 2011 and 12,000 students in 2012. 108 colleges participated in EAD 2012.

Some of the distinguished guests who have stood on the dais of EAD include Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, founder of Biocon, Phanindra Sama, CEO of Redbus.in, Arjun Malhotra, co-founder of HCL Technologies, Irrfan Alam, founder of Sammaan Foundation and the contemporary face of social entrepreneurship in India, and Shaheen Mistry, founder of Teach for India Foundation.

Symbiosis Institute of Management witnessed the first EAD’13 this 3^rd of Oct. After an insightful session, one of the participants, Rishikesh, said “I understood the fact that entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won't, so that you can spend the rest of your life like most people can't.”

Entrepreneurship Cell, IIT Kharagpur is a non-profit student organization established with the aim of fostering the spirit of entrepreneurship among college students in India. It is one of the most successful entrepreneurial organizations in the country with over 50 start-ups incubated within 7 years of inception.

For more details, log on to www.ead.ecell-iitkgp.org or www.ecell-iitkgp.org.