Issue of Leadership
Gandhi Fellowship is a full-time, residential, two-year leadership programme, which selects the best from among the inspired and inventive young people of India, to help them develop into Tomorrow’s Leaders, by giving practical, grassroots and transformational experience.
Sieving the future leaders of India from the top campuses across the country, the Gandhi Fellowship provides to them significant practical life experience, besides the grounding, exposure and training to absorb, learn and practice leadership abilities.
The youth, today, are playing significant leadership roles as their spheres expand and merge into newer domains. The Fellowship is designed to develop leaders, who will contribute primarily to social and public systems change, besides politics, academia, media and the corporate world. In the next decade we see ourselves developing a pipe-line of Nation-Builders (the operative word being Builder – of courage, solutions and change) and working towards developing a network. We want them to become future collaborators in re-visioning India, articulating problems, and diligently, brick by brick, developing solutions.
The Fellowship is an intense 24-month programme during which the Fellows – of different persuasions and predilections – examine not just the inadequacies of the system, but also make an introspection of their own challenges and motives. In and through a deeply transformative process of self-discovery and personal change, the Fellowship team encourages them to delve deep to discover their passions and devise ways of converting their private dreams into a public reality.
The two years at the Fellowship hold for the young people transformational experiences to:
- Augment their career choices in alignment with nation-building opportunities
- Help them innovate and deploy bottom-of-the-pyramid solutions
- Sensitize them to the problems facing India
- Help develop an active, sensitized citizenship.
The Gandhi Fellowship Programme is committed to becoming the pipe-line of India’s future Leaders and Nation Builders. 130 Gandhi Fellows joined the Programme in July 2012 from top colleges and universities across the country. They are young people with a hunger in the belly to develop a private dream, and, also the requisite skills and competencies necessary for becoming high performers in their respective domains.
Along the years these young driven and informed people have begun to see clear returns in the Fellowship, both emotional and practical. The Fellowship is a field-study oriented second-to-none Leadership Programme in India because of it extreme focus on action-for-impact. In the process the programme helps the Fellows unfold their own abilities, personalities and successes.
The Fellows receive on-site coaching and mentoring to help them negotiate the problems as well as come up with solutions. They live among the community, work with five schools (and communities); assist five elementary school Headmasters and, in the process, impact the lives of over 500 children.
The major thrust of the Fellowship is in helping the Fellows discover their Private Dream – helping them develop self awareness through the twin processes of reflection and collaborative group work. The Fellows transform themselves, even as they negotiate the transformation of the schools. Onsite mentoring, reflection and collaborative group work become tools of change in the school as well as with the Fellows.
Our experience with young people over a period of time tells us that only a few of them are exploring "unusual-constructive" paths of considering and solving the real problems of India. Most of them are reluctant in dirtying their hands, which is the first step in the process, and yet, expect a resurgent, changing India.
We would like to seed the idea of leadership in the college years to prepare young minds for becoming leaders as against just managers, and to pursue excellence and not merely success. Presently, there is hardly any discourse around leadership in India. In fact, leadership is often confused with heroics. We aspire to fill that gap in our system.