“Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people to cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants.”
-John W. Gardner quotes (American Writer and Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, 1912-2002)

This quotation by the author encompasses the true spirit with which the Entrepreneurship Development Cell in Dhriiti launched the Entrepreneurs of Tomorrow (EoT) Programme – an entrepreneurship development initiative with young people in undergraduate colleges.

The young people going to universities today come with big dreams and passions. But somewhere in the maze of career, competition, peer pressure, societal expectations, they lose their true self. What comes out of the university is a huge population which is homogeneous in their aspirations and the means to achieve them.

We end up with a cadre of youth which is mediocre in things they do not like doing than being expert in things they are passionate about.

The EoT Programme is an endeavor to bring out the passion, zeal and the spirit of enthusiasm that lives latent in the young India.

The EoT Programme has been designed to provide entrepreneurship education to young people attached to Universities/Colleges in India. It aims at glorifying the concept of entrepreneurship and providing youngsters the necessary skills to form and run their ventures and introduce entrepreneurship as a career option to them.

The programme is supported by the Youth and Civil Society wing of Sir Ratan Tata Trust.

“Investing fully in children today will ensure the well-being and productivity of future generations for decades to come.”
-----Carol Bellamy, Former Executive Director, UNICEF

The thought behind Entrepreneurship Development Cell in Dhriiti was not only to provide knowledge & skills on entrepreneurship but also influence the attitudes of the participants it worked with. It is with this thought that Building Entrepreneurs (BE) was started. Though it is a common perception in the country that the school students are too young to absorb the concepts of entrepreneurship, EDC firmly believes that the seed of entrepreneurship has to be planted at that stage so that the students are able to look at entrepreneurship as a positive option in future.

We believe that school is the phase when most of us start dreaming about our goals in life and how we would wish to see ourselves, after 20 years. The present education system in India orients children and youth towards jobs. However, the market scenario is unable to accommodate or even provide opportunities to this rich resource pool, which is an asset for any country. This dearth of jobs has led to several anti-social activities, which the educated unemployed have taken up.

The problem is more critical in the lower economic strata of the society. 75% of the age group of six years to fourteen years is enrolled in government schools, but 52% of children who enroll in Class I drop out by Class VIII and 62% by Class X. This is a large chunk of children with potential, which the education system is unable to retain and which continues to remain underutilized. Unable to find spaces and opportunities to bring out their talents, many children find themselves caught up in anti-social activities. Employment opportunities for this section are even more limited.

The programme in private and public schools is done on a charged basis and the programme in Government Schools is supported by Global Funds for Children, USA