Come Sunday, about 450 young aspiring entrepreneurs, mostly from small towns and villages in India, will be chugging into Bengaluru’s City Railway Station at 8 a.m. This is just one stop in their 15-day-long 8,000-kilometre train journey, Jagriti Yatra, across the length and breadth of the country.
"India has the potential to be the human resource power house of the world in the next decade. I see this yatra as a platform to tap into this youth potential through empowerment and entrepreneurship," said Prabhasa K.L., a ‘yatri’ and an aspiring entrepreneur from Bengaluru.
Through their journey, ‘yatris’ will get to meet and interact with successful business and social entrepreneurs. The idea, according to Heena Jaithanandani, manager of Jagriti Yatra Awareness, is for aspiring as well as young entrepreneurs to meet their social heroes and hear their stories of success and failure.
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In Bengaluru, they will be meeting Art of Living founder Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. In Chennai, they will be meeting geneticist and Father of the Green Revolution in India M.S. Swaminathan. In Delhi, participants are looking forward to interacting with Anshu Gupta, the founder of Goonj, which provides rehabilitation services to people affected by disasters across the country.
A total 12 destinations and meetings with 15 role models have been planned for this journey, which began in Mumbai on December 24 and will end on January 8, 2016 in Ahmedabad. “I have been on the yatra for two days and it inspires me every day. Every day, we meet social heroes who inspire us to believe in ourselves and to dream of a better future for our country,” says Eureka Aaling, a yatri from Assam.
The enterprise, in its eighth innings, gets 17,000 registrations every year of which 450 of the best are selected for the journey.
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