Today’s youth is hard working and aware, but given the intense competition, fear of failure also looms large in their mind. However, they can be trained & mentored to overcome their fears and inhibitions and take measured risks to excel in life. Their holistic development, can be ensured through training in soft skills and competencies that do not directly form a part of the academia. Traits of leadership, creativity, team building, inventiveness, problem solving, effective communication and such other winning qualities can enhance their abilities to perceive, evaluate, reason and reach the right decisions.

Entrepreneurship training encompasses modules that impart these soft skills and groom children to become high achieving individuals. Such training ‘catches them young’ and inculcates skills, traits and values that nurture right behavioral traits and inclinations among children and youth.

The need for such learning and skilling has been widely recognized and endorsed. Given this realization, the National Government, under the National Education Policy 2020 has also identified PM Shri Schools, wherein insistence is on grooming students in entrepreneurial and life skills to make them future-ready.

Entrepreneurship Development Institute of India (EDII), Ahmedabad has been closely working with youths and children for last over four decades. The Institute has thus far imparted entrepreneurial competencies, soft skills and counselling through short-duration camps to more than 4500 children and youths from across the nation. Additionally, more than 1900 students have been trained to adopt entrepreneurship as a career, through application-oriented Post Graduate Programmes. The Institute has also developed curriculum on Entrepreneurship for University Grants Commission and text books for Gujarat Textbooks Board and Central Board of Secondary Education, for 11th & 12th Std. It has also created a cadre of teachers of higher education, as entrepreneurship resource persons, as a part of its association with regulatory bodies.

Sculpting its mandate around this mission of creating high achievers, EDII looks forward to increasing its effort towards cultivating entrepreneurial bent of mind and knowledge in children and youth by reaching out to schools covered under the PM Shri Scheme.