Independence Day pledge to offer jobs instead of seeking them

Mou Chakraborty
Kolkata, August 14, 2007
On the occasion of 60th Independence Day, students of IIT Kharagpur, Bengal Engineering and Science University (BESU), Shibpur, Jadavpur University and various colleges in the city will take a special oath. They will pledge to become entrepreneurs paving the way for economic independence of the nation.
This will be a Pan IIT program where all the seven IIT’s will organise the oath-taking ceremony for the first time. University and college students will take the oath across 17 cities in the country. IIT Kharagpur’s head of entrepreneurship programmes Dhrubesh Biswas is organising the program for eastern India. “We feel this will motivate students to become job givers rather than job seekers and give a big push to the Indian economy,” said Biswas. Invitations have been sent to all college and universities in Kolkata.
On August 15 about 150 students from IIT-KGP will arrive in Kolkata to take the oath with other students in the city. “The pledge will talk about creating equal opportunities by creating enterprises to liberate our country,” said Biswas. The pledge will be taken at 5 pm, followed by a panel discussion on entrepreneurship. Leaflets and information brochures will also be distributed to students.
Though people take many such pledges as on new years’ day and promptly forget all about it, Biswas hopes students will remember this pledge. “It true that people often forget their oaths but we are trying to make it very special. There will help at hand for interested students and we feel many students will take it up seriously.” The department of science and technology, Intel and the Indo-US Science and Technology Forum are sponsoring the program.
The entrepreneurship ventures have been divided into two categories — hi-tech and livelihood based — and deserving proposals will be given financial help and students can avail requisite training from the IIT. “In order to groom students to become entrepreneurs we need to catch them young. This is just the beginning and from next year we will try to conduct this event in schools as well,” said Biswas.
The oath-taking ceremony will be followed by a daylong entrepreneurship conclave to be organised in IIT-KGP on August 17. Institutions from Assam, Tripura, Bihar, Jharkhand, Orissa and Bengal will take part.
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