Teach for India is Neev 2009 Soul Partner

Gaurav Parab

Business school and business in general teaches one a lot, including Problem Solving and Time Management. Not as pre-defined courses, but as a common thread running across everything you have to do. Problem Solving is situational analysis, problem definition, and feasible solutions backed with alternatives. Time management is but impatience. If problem cannot be solved quickly, it is perhaps not a problem. It is what strategy solves. And strategy is someone else’s problem. The vision which blurs and gets modified along a timeline. Long term solutions naturally become short term firefights.

In life, doing good no longer remains doing good - it becomes CSR. A responsibility that one has to do, in spurts, with fixed budgets and defined timelines. Don’t do too much good this quarter, since we wrapped up the last quarter with our targeted goodness.

Problem Solving, Time Management, CSR and Strategy diverge while they should have spawned from the same seed. Definitions get blurred, and the approach to solving long term issues, especially social problems has become doing the right things, but doing them fast.

So big money is thrown impatiently at social problems. The resulting smiles unfortunately fade away after short durations. Till someone else comes along, starts from scratch and picks up the baton.

To paint a house beautiful, throw a lot of paint at it. As and when it arrives.

And so was the trend.

Enter Teach for India, an organization that is applying the correct method of problem solving correctly to the correct problem.

Education, the root of every brilliant fruit. Education, the missing branch responsible for everything rotten. Situational analysis and problem solving at its most accurate best.

Based on the hugely successful Teach For America program, TFI believes that to achieve educational equity for all children, a movement of committed leaders is required with the will to work. To paint a house beautiful, scrap the surface and ask the right painter to paint.

The proven model is brilliant in its simplicity. TFI believes that the reason behind India’s criminal school drop-out rate is the fact that most public schools are not worth attending in the first place. If they are lucky enough to have the acceptable number of teachers, the teachers lack the motivation to teach. If the teachers have the motivation to teach, they follow outdated teaching methodologies. Children have no reason to be attending school. They have no reason to remain children. School is no longer school.

Now, the easy way to solve this problem of missing students would be to throw a whole lot of money at developing quality schools for the underprivileged in select locations. While any investment in education is good, the problem with such an approach is the limited reach and the fact that attitudes remain unchanged. A good school is but a beautiful song lost in the noise of deeper problems. To find missing melodies, you need more singers. Not more songs.

India already has an extensive number of public and private schools. A network which is unfortunately made up of schools with crumbling infrastructure, manpower shortage and disinterested guardians. TFI aims to upgrade this obsolete hardware, by arming it with brilliant software. Young professionals and graduates from leading educational institutes like SCMHRD are trained as fellows to dedicate two years of their lives to being agents of change in under resourced educational institutes. The fellows go to understaffed public and private schools, engage students through exciting learning sessions, and change lives. But this is not where their contribution stops. After completing their fellowships, these young leaders are assisted in joining leading companies, the government and other organizations to become the voice of education for all of society to hear. Singers who sing that song for the rest of their lives. Talk about back- up plans in a HBS case study being implemented in sync with the main solution.

The young teachers learn too. Exposed to the real world, these youngsters are given the benefit of analyzing, designing, and implementing real time solutions for their students. Whoever said that leadership cannot be taught in school should see how brilliant leaders have been bred by the now well established Teach for America program.

We at NEEV 2009 remain in awe of what the well organized TFI team is doing to change the face of the country. As the fellows of TFI apply lessons of problem solving, time management and long term strategy to teach young minds, we can’t help but believe that this initiative in some years will do what it has set out to and beyond. Not just impart education, but impart excellent education.

Every year we collaborate with leading multi- national companies to organize NEEV, an event for the most brilliant young minds to showcase their abilities. This year at NEEV 2009, we are privileged to work with TFI as our all important Soul Partners. We hope an event of NEEVs scale will help TFI reach out to future leaders from across the country.

TFI welcome to NEEV 2009. It is our absolute privilege to have you as our Soul Partners.