How can today’s youth make the Earth a better place?

It is an uncontested truth that the youth population in any region play an essential role in dictating the direction that their country is heading and the priorities that it fosters. According to projections by the UNFPA, India has (and will continue to have) the youngest population in the world until 2030. Not only does this imply that India’s youth can change our own country but it also implies that our youth have the potential to change the entire world.

But what informs our youth’s passions and interests? If you speak with any student today, you will likely find that they are brimming with ideas and changes that they would like to make in our country: be it to fight the spectre of climate change or spread awareness on human rights to equal opportunities. All they need is a framework and mentoring to activate their ideas to reality.

However, how much do India’s best students even know their country?

Is social change in our country a simple by-product of passion? Alas, the equation is never that easy or simple. As enthusiastic and bright as the students in India’s best schools may be, they continue to live at a one-arm’s-distance from 65% of their neighbours - the population in rural India, the entity better known as Bharat.

In the absence of some much-needed grounding, India’s youth change-makers face the imminent struggle of working with overly-generalised stereotypes to understand India’s majority population and the problems faced by them. The important question then becomes - what can our education system do to address this gap in understanding real-world challenges? How can we ensure that student change-makers are exposed to and aware of the lives and problems in our hinterlands?

ALSO READ

Meet the 17-year-olds who have won a global award for their ML model that detects genital skin cancer

Some key learnings from my own experience

This is a question I’ve tried to answer in my personal regard as well. Having spent more than 8 years supporting change makers, and youth entrepreneurs and working to solve problems in India’s villages, I decided to use my understanding and curate a framework of systemic issues and problems that needed solving in the villages. After developing this framework, I decided to leverage the brightest students from the best schools in urban India and involve them to work on these key issues. Why not channel the educated and privileged youth to work for the rest of India? Hence, the name of my organisation: 1 Million for 1 Billion (1M1B) 

A Golden Bridge to fix it all?

The underlying idea is to build a bridge to connect the top and bottom of the pyramid. Currently, the bottom of the pyramid lacks resources, business acumen and strategic models while the top lacks an understanding of the lives in villages and a cultural sensitivity for the same. By creating avenues for students to immerse themselves in this context, we can ensure that India’s change-makers are able to utilise their problem-solving skills effectively and in a grounded manner.

This becomes especially important in the context where undergraduate applications to foreign universities from India have doubled in just one year. While it is certainly important for students to embark on this global journey and learn from different cultures, it is equally important for them to learn about their own country properly and get some grounding before leaving.

This is the only way to ensure that our youth can solve real problems while acquiring critical skills for the future. Developing a pipeline of human-centred leaders who value people and the planet more than business and profits is important.

The Bottom Line

If we truly want to empower India’s youth to be the change-makers that we need to see, we need to ensure that they are not closeted away from the harsh and often bitter realities of real India. It is only by getting their hands dirty in the mud, speaking to real people, that they will be able to solve the most urgent problems in India that need solving. To deliver on this, we need to ensure the following:

• Establishing real-world exposure in our education system: India’s schools need to start including modules or projects that enable students to visit neighbouring rural villages and work with the local communities to solve their problems. Students should be assigned experienced mentors who can assist them. This is the only way to ensure an exchange of ideas between two distant yet interconnected worlds. We need initiatives that are more than just volunteering.

• Mobilising resources: More corporates and universities need to start allocating funds (be it CSR or otherwise) towards initiatives that connect the urban youth (and future corporate leaders) with rural India to address real problems. India can only develop into a superpower if we direct intellectual and monetary resources into decreasing our worrying wealth gap.

In our own way, my organisation 1M 1B has tried to pilot and experiment a model based on the philosophy outlined above. In collaboration with the University of California Berkeley, College of Engineering SCET and the Innovation Acceleration Group, ‘The Purpose Academy’ aims to equip students with technology, ideas, creativity, resources, and the motivation to build disruptive solutions and create real impact.

Real problems solvers from urban schools are matched to real people from the less privileged India seeking solutions. Developing AI solutions for farmers, to activating people staying near forests and buffer zones in the fight on climate action, to providing clean water and health services to the marginalised, the third cohort starting this summer, June 2022 will be working on these bold topics. The top solutions get an opportunity to present at the Silicon Valley and UC Berkeley in October 2022. I certainly look forward to seeing similar such initiatives that are able to empower our youth.