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Hamara Dhandha

I have previously written about Prof. Prasad and his initiatives to promote student entrepreneruship through his National Center for student Entrepreneurship (NCSE) in the NITIE campus. He is courting students nowadays for his Hamara Dhandha initative.

Prodded by him to come and 'lecture' the students on the idea of student entrepreneurship - I went to NITIE on July 4th - the audience was thin because committee interviews were going on. So not sure if Prof Prasad will get many volunteers ...

I explained the guys the need for looking our of the NITIE universe - the PMG's and Placecoms - to work in stuff like Hamara Dhandha. The philosophy doing rounds in most B-school campuses (as it had been through our times as well) is that stuff like events, industry lectures, internal committees, paper presentations etc - are the major contributors towards a heavier CV which ultimately helps during placement.

However, what this philosophy fails to notice is how the landscape in Business Education has changed since 2000 through 2005 to 2009/10. Earlier only top 10 B-schools had events, now every institute (even non-MBA institutes) have their events. Earlier there were few prestigious summer project / paper presentation events - now there's a crowd out there and so on. In such a scenario:
  • Events organized by a B-school are no more a differentiator for us. While absence of these events would definitely harm its reputation, their presence does not add as much value as it used to.
  • Participation and success in winning such events are no more differetiators for a student per se. And so also applies for other modes of "CV enrichment" like involvement in committees.
Thus the way forward for students to create a 'differentiated CV' are opportunities like Hamara Dhandha - an initative which allows students to incubate companies, use them as case studies and 'projects' during their MBA course, also use them as summer internships. Here's a presentation that I gave to the NITIE folks:
The good part was that majority those who came about 15-20 of them seemed to be people genuinely interested in entrep stuff. Many of them had thought out ideas similar to ours - in fact 2 guys were already thinking on lines of IMDB.in and Rasta Dikhao.

Meanwhile Prof Prasad is onto his next idea - the National ID project :-) He is planning to engage students in clones of the National ID project (being headed by Nandan Nilekani) so as to create awareness about the idea.

Btw - Prof Prasad gave me a memento ... a BIG frame of Mahatma Gandhi on the charkha ... I love this thing about Prof Prasad - trust him to make heroes out of saints :-)

Comments

  1. Hey Nikhil..

    I didnt know you write so well :-) Liked many of your ideas here.. BTW I have become big fan of Arbit :-) Just a thought..Why dont you create a group on smsgupshup (smsgupshup.com) or may be tie up with them and you can send this strip to hundreds of MBA students via smses and earn some revenue?!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. BTW this is Sweta from KPMG :-)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi Nikhil,
    Nice write up. My two pennies worth:
    a) Hamara Dhandha link in first paragraph is not working )-:
    b) IMDB idea has been floating around. There are forums which are pretty active (Check - http://www.hamaraforums.com/lofiversion/index.php/f53.html). Nothing organised - would require somebody with in depth knowledge of hindi/regional films as anchor person.By the way have you read 'Dhuno Ki Yatra' by Pankaj Rag? That is the kind of person required to do this.
    c) Toptable.com is 'hungrybangalore.com'. Pretty successfull - diluted trying to replicate to other cities.
    d) Most cities have Radio Taxies now - call a number, hire a taxi kind. What is the revenue model for "Rasta Dihao" over phone?

    ReplyDelete
  4. simple smile ... great going bhai:)

    ReplyDelete
  5. Bhopale - thx for pointing out the link error. I have corrected the link now - it had an extra 'h' before the http.. :-P

    ReplyDelete
  6. Hi,

    Could you please get me in touch with the content manager of this website?

    Regards

    ReplyDelete

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