Indian education’s missing link is “the bottomline”, says Delhi Deputy CM

The repeated searches by CBI are taking place amid probe in a money laundering case related to the alleged Delhi excise policy scam also involving Sisodia.

Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia said on Friday that the city-state’s Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government was trying to improve the quality of school education in the national capital, which he described as the bottomline.

“Everyone has worked on (the assumption that the) sky is the limit but no one worked on the quality of education, which forms the bottomline. While 1 percent of the country’s students are those who start working on AI (Artificial Intelligence), coding, programming in class VI, there is still the fact that we have been unable to determine the bottomline for our remaining 99 percent,” Sisodia said.

While the top 400 students of the country may become CEOs of the world’s top companies, that will not decide the national average, Sisodia said at the Delhi Education Summit, organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII).

“The average of the country will be decided by what students of government or even jhuggi schools are doing,” he said.

To counter the prevalent education system, which focuses on “rote learning,” the Delhi government has started projects such as the Entrepreneurship Mindset Curriculum and Seed Money.

“We are working on giving our students a job provider mindset. We have thus begun an Entrepreneurship Mindset Curriculum and teach it to students of classes IX-XII. We teach them stories of common entrepreneurs like Bittu Tikki Wala whose tales are those of rags to riches. We make such classes interactive, inviting successful entrepreneurs to their classes,” he said.

“We are providing children of classes XI-XII with Rs 2,000 seed money each. We ask them to make groups and brainstorm ideas, which are represented in the class, very similar to the Shark Tank style. Innovative ideas are picked up from there,” he says.

The Delhi government’s Entrepreneurship Mindset Curriculum was launched in 2019 with the goal of providing school-leaving children with the mindset of job providers rather than job seekers.

The seed money project was started in 2021 in as many as 1,000 government schools in the national capital to build business skills in students.

“During this, almost 150,000 students worked on 50,000 business ideas. We chose about 125 best business ideas and organized an investment summit. We raised a total amount of about Rs 8 crore for these ideas. We registered the companies for these students and gave them investors. We also spoke with our state universities and got almost 57 of these students seats in our best universities. They came to the universities without any formal competition because they crossed a different competition that was more difficult,” said Sisodia.

“We overcame several problems in Delhi's education system after 2015. There were leakages in the foundation and missing links in the education policies. This is a country that gets good jobs, we want to make it a country that will give good jobs. That is where we are heading with the initiatives launched. These students will have the potential to create world-class companies, to found tomorrow’s Twitter, and Facebook,” Sisodia added.