The ‘Nirman’ Initiative: The Happy Pursuit of Meaningfulness

This was published in The Wire on Sept 2, 2017. Here is the link, and below is an extract.

“Our conventional education system… is mainly geared towards filling job vacancies, not sociopolitical vacuums. It is this serious deficiency that doctors and public health scientists Rani Bang and Abhay Bang decided to address about a decade ago. In the early 2000s, the Bangs saw that very few young people were choosing to work on social challenges as against their own student days when social consciousness and grassroots work was far more popular and acceptable. As a unique solution, they conceived Nirman. It was to be an educational space for college students and young working individuals to help them come face to face with the nation’s plethora of social issues and also with people working hard to solve them. Through Nirman, they intended to encourage young Indians to step out of their generally secure urban surroundings into the precarious world of rural and tribal Indians.”