Jagriti Yatra – A Journey of Discovery and Transformation
Jagriti Yatra is an ambitious annual train journey of discovery and transformation that takes hundreds of India's highly motivated youth on a 15 day national odyssey. The first Yatra took place in 2008. The aim of the Yatra is to awaken the spirit of entrepreneurship and the vision is to inspire young Indians to lead development.
My Yatra
I started my Yatra along with 449 others, on 24th of December 2011 from IIT Mumbai. The Yatra started with a motivating speech by Dr. Raghunath Mashelkar. Dr. Mashelkar enlightened us about his own life, he narrated his life experiences on how he overcame poverty and other struggles in his life and finally made it successful.
After the flag hoisting ceremony was over, the 15 day journey started moving from city to city through different states of India. The social role models who have transformed millions of lives around them were the main targets.
Meeting Role Models
The fellow passengers – also called Yatris- met 10 different role models across 10 different cities in India. The objective of the visits was to study about each role model’s vision, financial model, and its social impact. The role models whom we met were:-
- SELCO (The Solar Electric Light Company) - Works in the area of affordable solar lighting for poor
- Infosys- The Indian IT major
- Aravind Eye Care – One of the largest facilities in the world for eye care
- Travel Another India- An enterprise that works with rural communities and helps them own, manage and control travel ventures
- Naandi Foundation- Works to create sustainable, affordable solutions to long-pending development problems of the country in the field of hunger, sanitation and children’s rights
- Gram Vikas- Works for a range of activities from biogas, drip irrigation, water and sanitation and education in the tribal communities of Orissa
- Nidan-Works for legal rights for urban unorganized sector workers
- Goonj-Works on the issue of clothing for poor
- Barefoot College-Teaches illiterate men and women from impoverished villages to become doctors, solar engineers, architects and other such professions
- SEWA (Self Employed Women’s Association) - Works to organize women workers for full employment and self reliance.
Enlightening panel discussions
Apart from the role model visits one other major aspect of the Yatra were the panel discussions. The objective of these panel discussions was to bring relevant thought leaders as panelists, simulate thinking around the topics and let interesting thoughts emerge for the audience to grab. All the panel discussions were very insightful. Four different panel discussions took place in four different cities across India:-
- Technology Start-ups and Social Impact
- Enabling Rural and Agri Enterprises
- Skill Development Enterprises- Opportunities and Challenges
- Power of One
During the long journey five different sessions happened on the train. These were conducted by experts from different fields, for which the topics were:-
- Women and Leadership
- Typography
- Plastic and Sustainability
- Listening Skills
- Product Design
The objective of these sessions was to get the Yatris introduced to these different aspects of business and entrepreneurship.
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- Rephrasing book title ‘In defense of Globalization’ by Jagdish Bhagwati’.
- http://research.google.com/pubs/pub38315.html
- http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/%7Epcairns/papers/ChawdaCraftCairns.pdf