The lead in every newspaper when board exam results are announced is how girls outshine boys yet again.
However, in reality, a majority of these girls do not manage to achieve bigger things simply because of financial constraints or social challenges — a situation Human Resource Development Minister Smriti Irani wants to set right with use of information technology.
All this and more was announced to more than 35,000 students, who were jointly addressed by the Minister as well as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Tuesday, at the “Microsoft Talent India 2014,” the company’s initiative to use its resources to help Indian youth succeed in the new digital economy.
While Mr. Nadella, who is on his first trip to the country after becoming the CEO, spoke about the importance of doing what you love and looking at every opportunity as a learning experience, Ms. Irani spoke about the importance of IT as a key factor in providing a better tomorrow for India’s youth as promised by her government.
“Soon, every Central University, Indian Institute of Technology, and the Indian Institute of Management will have scholarship programmes. And we are focusing on the Northeast too. We will facilitate 2,000 students and 500 faculty members to travel to these institutes and see the technology used there, as well as other things that they could use in their own institutes. This will go hand-in-hand with scholarships for 10,000 students,” she said, adding that another feature she would introduce is a council for academic and industry interface, which will have a placement cell at all Central Universities as well as IITs and IIMs.
“We have managed to get details of 50,000 meritorious students who cannot study further because of financial constraints,” said Ms. Irani, while talking at length about the “digital India campaign,” which she wants to promote as a national agenda along with the other agendas of her government.
“The mygov.in is an initiative where citizens have not just commented on politicians, but also given concrete ideas about policy which the government can use,” she said.
Students asked questions that ran from how soon technology would be made available to those in small towns to how a person could move with the times in spite of working for decades in the same industry.
The importance of continuous “learning” and not just continuous “employment”, as well as the ability to listen, change with the times and experiment, and learn to move on from failure were listed as the key factors for professional success.
