Typically, despite boasting the world’s largest gems and jewellery industry in the world with over one million people employed within it, the centrally planned Indian economy lacks a formal vocational school for its No.1 hard currency earning business. Fortunately, this inexplicable lacuna has been made good, even if belatedly. The first Indian branch of the Carlsbad, California (USA)-based Gemmological Institute of America (GIA) sited in Mumbai recently admitted its first batch of 23 students.

Promoted in 1931 as a not-for-profit vocational training institution, GIA which has 900 employees on its Carlsbad campus, offers over 30 gems and diamond grading, identification and sales study programmes to 275 vocational and executive students in its headquarters and distance education to an additional 15,000 students around the world. “Given the huge presence of India in the fast-expanding global gems and jewellery business, it made good sense to promote a vocational training institute in this country. In our opinion there’s rising demand for skills upgradation study programmes in India and the Indian gems and jewellery industry has been very supportive of this initiative,” says Brook Ellis, a commerce graduate of the University of Toronto and former director of Henry Birks (a high-profile Canadian jewellery retail company) who is the incumbent vice president (education) of GIA.

The institute’s first college in India occupies a whole floor of Maker Chambers VI, in Nariman Point, an upscale business area of Mumbai, and is headed by Deepak Bagai a former IPS (Indian Police Service) officer who also trained as a gemologist in GIA affiliates in the US and Britain. The Mumbai school which has received clearance from the Delhi-based All India Council for Technical Education, has a faculty of six which will be supplemented by visiting faculty from GIA, Carlsbad. Fees range from Rs.28,000 for part-time to Rs.1.75 lakh for full-time, intensive seven week programmes.

“India has hundreds of thousands of gems and jewellery craftsmen and experts whose skills need to be polished with formal study programmes. This is the explanation for the enthusiastic response of industry to this initiative in India. I am confident that the Mumbai GIA will give a great productivity and quality consciousness boost to India’s high-potential gems and jewellery industry,” says Ellis.

A sparkling prospect indeed.

Dilip Thakore (Mumbai)

Satisfactory combination

Quite evidently Mysore-based electronics engineer and entrepreneur extraordinaire S.V. Venkatesh shares the development biases of the newly inducted governments of the state of Karnataka and the Indian Union (as also of EducationWorld). He believes that a better deal for rural India is long overdue, especially in terms of provision of quality education. “Though rural students are as intelligent and talented as their urban counterparts, they lack the necessary financial resources to pursue higher studies. Gnana scholarships is our contribution to help rural youth to become computer literate and enter the information technology and IT-enabled service industries. We have to understand that everyone can’t become a programmer or software engineer. Our aim is to empower rural youth with necessary computer skills as per their capabilities and backgrounds,” says Venkatesh who was born in the small town of Bhadravathi, where he studied in a government school before acquiring a diploma in electronic engineering from the DVS Polytechnic, Shimoga.

Currently Venkatesh is CEO of Raman Computers Pvt Ltd (RCPL) whose training division, the Raman International Institute of Information Technology (RiiiT) recently announced 300 Gnanascholarships for talented, financially deprived rural youth of Karnataka. The first round of scholarship exams were written by 4,000 class XII pass students on July 26-30 in 22 RiiiT study centres across the state. The second round of exams will be held during the first week of this month. According to RiiiT sources, the top six performers in this examination will be awarded full scholar-ships and admission into RiiiT’s one-year diploma programme in any one stream — programming, hardware and networking, office automation or graphic design and multimedia. The remaining 294 awardees will be offered admission to the nearest RiiiT teaching centre on payment of half (Rs.8,000-10,000) the stipulated fee.

Despite his modest formal qualifi-cations, after a three year sales job with a chemicals company in 1991, Venkatesh went solo and promoted RCPL with a mission to provide “quality computer education at affordable prices” to rural youth, with a personal computer borrowed from a friend and Rs.1.50 in petty cash.

Within a year RCPL had established a fully-fledged training centre equipped with six workstations and had over 300 students on its rolls in Mysore. Not one to forget his humble beginnings, Venkatesh promoted IT study centres in the small towns and rural backwaters of Karnataka. Today RiiiT (annual revenue: Rs.5 crore) has a network of over 22 training centres in small towns and taluk headquarters such as Holenarasipur, Sandur, Bhadravathi, Kadur, Gadag among others, with over 5,000 students on their musters.

Not surprisingly Venkatesh’s pioneering effort has attracted attention of the World Bank, which has chosen RiiiT as its partner to implement an IT training project in rural Karnataka. Under this project, talented youth from below poverty line families are trained to become IT enabled. Currently 2,050 students are being trained in RiiiT’s 22 centres across the state. “India has a large population which is currently a liability, but quality education can transform it into an asset. Our immediate plans are to establish one RiiiT centre in every taluk headquarter in the state and make computer education available at affordable prices to every rural student,” says Venkatesh.

Having experienced success in IT education, under the aegis of a new division — Raman Infotech — Venkatesh and his team have developed a software package to facilitate administrative processes and procedures (christened Edusys 1.0) of school managements.

Quite obviously there are ways to combine commercial success with personal satisfaction.

Srinidhi Raghavendra (Bangalore)

Street children enabler

Anselm Rosario is the founder and managing trustee of the Bangalore-based NGO Mythri Sarva Seva Samithi (MSSS), founded in 1987, with the objective of making life easier for the growing number of street children — rag or waste pickers in particular. “While the trust was constituted to alleviate conditions of child rag-pickers, our activities have since expanded to providing solid waste management services and urban sanitation advice. Currently we are focusing on Bangalore with a project in Dharwad and one in Tamil Nadu,” says Rosario.

A science graduate of Bangalore’s well-known St. Joseph’s College, with a diploma in hotel management, Rosario worked with several well-known hotels in the city before a chance meeting with a transcendental meditation (TM) guru transformed his life and vocation. He learned TM in Bangalore and at Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashram in Rishikesh, after which he travelled the country propagating the art of TM (1974-81).

Back in Bangalore in the mid-eighties, Rosario observed young street children scavenging in dustbins, sorting out plastic and paper for sale to waste dealers to eke out a living. Moved by their plight, Rosario felt driven to ameliorate their pitiful living conditions. “We approached the Archdiocese of Bangalore which provided a facility where 60 children could wash and sleep. Food and basic medical care was also provided to them,” he recalls.

Thus under the aegis of Mythri Sarva Seva Samithi was born the Waste Wise Trust, a non-profit enterprise. Fifteen years later, the trust is an independent registered organisation engaged in solid waste management. While MSSS focuses its attention upon street children, slum dwellers and champions children’s rights, Waste Wise is focused upon environment management issues. MSSS currently has 22 volunteers working on its mission and has the support of other well-known NGOs such as CRY and Action Aid.

Coterminously the Waste Wise Trust employs 18 volunteers who have developed an alternative waste management strategy. The salient features of the strategy are community participation, the development of waste pickers and recycling of waste to put it to productive use. “Rag pickers have a good knowledge of recycling and hence their work needs to be recognised and their working conditions improved,” explains Rosario. To this end Waste Wise has employed several rag pickers and provided them uniforms, badges and protective gear to reduce health risks. In addition, job training is given to these children to enable them to graduate to other professions.

“Mythri is committed to the management of waste materials and development of wasted human beings. Our work aims at taking small steps to change the face of urban poverty and degradation of the urban environment. Great things can flow from small beginnings,” says Rosario.

Wind in your sails, brother!

Sangeeta Venkatesh (Bangalore)

 Timely initiative

With mounting customer dissatisfaction over the quality of school education, student evaluation systems and teaching/ learning methodologies, the need for expert intervention to facilitate improvements is increasing steadily, especially within quality-conscious school managements. It was to fulfil this need that learning specialist Dr. Vasanthi Vasudev launched Osmosys, an education consultancy firm in Chennai recently. She is assisted by a team of professionals with rich teaching experience, who serve as franchisees of the firm’s products and services. Osmosys is committed to developing learning products and delivering an entire range of services in education: differentiated teaching programmes for teachers; curriculum planning and evaluation for school managements; education consultancy and career counselling for students, and technology and quality consultancy services to education institutions.

“Our objective is to popularise psycho-pedagogy among teachers, students and parents and develop quality consciousness and technology based systems in educational institutions. We want to empower individuals with knowledge and skills that they can share and transfer to others. We plan to develop entrepreneurial skills in teachers and build a learning products distribution system,” says Vasudev, an alumna of Delhi, Nagpur and Madras universities who has a doctorate in international relations from Delhi University. In a career spanning several decades she has taught in India and abroad, worked actively with the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) in curriculum innovation and after a brief stint as college lecturer, joined the Sri Siva Swami Kalalaya Senior Secondary School, Chennai where she rose to become principal.

Vasudev progressed to education consultancy after working with Schoolnet India as senior educational resource person and continues to work with its successor organisation IL&FS Education Technology Services as an independent consultant. She is also a registered QMS (quality management systems) auditor.

Vasudev’s new venture has already got off to a good start and she has conducted learning programmes in 17 institutions around the country, including Lawrence, Lovedale and other schools in the Nilgiris, DAV Public School and Vidya Mandir Senior Secondary School in Chennai, and the Indus International School and NIFT in Bangalore. Her future plans are to expand her services network to every part of the country, including remote villages. “I want to make a difference to educational institutions by empowering teachers and transforming them into entrepreneurs, so that they can work independently and develop the concept,” says Vasudev.

With quality having become the new buzzword in Indian education, Vasudev’s entrepreneurial venture is the appropriate response at an apposite time and bodes well for the future.

Hemalatha Raghupathi (Chennai)