Hands-On Projects

Context: NEP 2020 and NCF 2023 mandate a shift from rote learning to competency based education. Gujarat, with 1.1 crore students, is a vital testing ground for formative assessments and innovative pedagogy. However, embedding locally contextualized curricula within the state’s vast school system requires structured administrative leadership and pedagogical reform.

Challenge: District level implementation struggles with limited resources and weak ownership. District Collectors lack structured frameworks and incentives to drive these educational reforms. Ensuring accountability and sustainable adoption of NEP-NCF priorities remains difficult without a clear roadmap that aligns administrative authority with academic goals.

Description: This project designs a district focused framework for NEP-NCF implementation in Gujarat. it analyzes models like the Happiness Curriculum and global experiential learning to recommend actionable steps. The project focuses on incentivizing leadership, integrating formative assessments, and creating guidelines to embed local culture into the learning process.

Context: As of May 2025, over 3.7 lakh civil society organisations are registered on NGO Darpan, with nearly 29,000 focused on education. Despite this presence, district administrations lack structured frameworks to tap into these actors effectively to improve educational outcomes and school quality.

Challenges: Partnerships remain sporadic, personality driven, and poorly institutionalised. District leaders face limited guidance on engagement protocols, due diligence, and outcome alignment. This reduces the strategic value of collaborations and leads to fragmented efforts rather than systemic impact.

Description: This project develops an administrator facing handbook to guide District Magistrates in systematically onboarding and managing CSO partnerships. It covers engagement models, MoU frameworks, and monitoring tools. The handbook provides protocols to ensure legal compliance and outcome alignment.

Context: Entrepreneurship education is largely absent in India’s public schools, with fewer than 5% of government schools offering structured exposure. While NEP 2020 promotes experiential learning, scalable interventions to build entrepreneurial mindsets in underserved areas are still evolving and lack systemic integration.

Challenge: Government schools face constraints like untrained educators, rigid curricula, and weak ecosystem linkages. There is no comprehensive, scalable model to integrate entrepreneurial thinking across diverse geographies. Bridging this gap requires balancing institutional limitations with the need for flexible, practical learning.

Description: This project creates a framework for embedding entrepreneurship education into government schools. It analyzes models like Business Blasters and Atal Tinkering Labs to identify successful elements. The team will co-design an adaptable curriculum, funding models, and faculty mechanisms while recommending partnerships with incubators and local businesses.

Context: India has made strides through iCET, QUAD, and missions with the EU and Japan. However, it lacks an institutionalized playbook for diplomats to systematically engage foreign tech ecosystems. This gap hinders the ability to nurture partnerships for businesses, safeguard critical interests, and proactively shape global technology governance.

Challenge: Diplomatic missions engage on tech issues without a standard framework to prioritize technologies of national interest or map foreign R&D ecosystems. This leads to fragmented gains and missed opportunities in translating partnerships into tangible developmental and security outcomes compared to global peers.

Description: This project creates a Science and Technology Diplomacy Playbook for the MEA. It equips policymakers with tools to map global ecosystems and frameworks to design partnerships in critical technologies. The playbook provides guidelines to safeguard against dependency and models to strengthen India’s role in tech governance.

Context: Indian cities generate 75% of GDP but face severe air pollution, flooding, and heatwaves. While MoHUA programs like AMRUT 2.0 emphasize climate resilience, most local bodies lack integrated frameworks. This leads to fragmented interventions in waste, water, and green cover rather than cohesive planning.

Challenge: Planning processes prioritize infrastructure over sustainability. Local bodies lack standardized tools for climate risk assessment, green budgeting, and ecological zoning. Citizen participation is often limited to awareness campaigns, lacking structured mechanisms for co-managing lakes or forests.

Description: This project develops a framework to integrate climate resilience into urban planning. It analyzes master plans to identify blind spots and proposes tools like risk mapping and green budgeting. It also highlights citizen led stewardship models that can be institutionalized within city governance.

Context: India generates 3.5 million tonnes of plastic waste annually, but only 30% is recycled. Hill states like Almora face unique crises, producing 35 tonnes daily that often goes unmanaged due to jurisdictional gaps. Plastic dumps along rivers threaten ecosystems despite successful civil society efforts like Healing Himalayas.

Challenge: Tourist areas and peri-urban zones often fall outside municipal boundaries, creating a governance vacuum. Plastic piles up without accountability, and changing citizen behavior regarding single use plastics remains difficult. This results in unmanaged waste in no man’s land zones with no clear authority.

Description: This project designs a Plastic Waste Management Framework for governance vacuums. It combines a carrot and stick approach with civil society participation. The study analyzes jurisdictional gaps and proposes actionable behavioral and institutional mechanisms to fix waste accountability and promote recycling.

Context: India has over 97 lakh teachers, yet transfer processes—essential for balancing regional learning outcomes—face opacity and politicization. While states like Karnataka and Odisha show promise with digital systems, many regions still rely on inconsistent methods that bypass merit or need-based criteria, leading to a misallocation of human resources.

Challenge: Teacher transfers are often arbitrary, lacking transparency and stakeholder trust. Many movements are influenced by personal networks rather than student-centric requirements. This results in urban over-concentration while remote districts face vacancy rates exceeding 30%, directly undermining education equity in underserved areas.

Description: This project aims to design a replicable, need-based framework for teacher transfers. It involves mapping existing rules, analyzing transfer patterns, and identifying process gaps. The goal is to co-create a decision-support matrix that aligns teacher preferences with school requirements and policy norms to ensure a transparent, merit-linked system.

Context: India faces rising climate risks with over 80% of its districts—573 out of 718—classified as hotspots for extreme weather events (CEEW, 2021). The Climate Risk Index 2023 ranks India among the top 10 most affected countries. Himalayan glaciers are melting rapidly, sea levels are rising, and intensifying heatwaves and erratic rainfall patterns are exposing India’s districts to escalating climate risks.

Challenge: District administrations are increasingly tasked with leading climate adaptation and mitigation, yet most lack structured guidance tailored to local geographies. The absence of actionable, region-specific frameworks limits their ability to mainstream climate resilience into planning, infrastructure, and service delivery—especially across diverse terrains like coastal belts, flood-prone plains, or ecologically fragile hill regions.

Description: This project will develop a comprehensive handbook to empower District Commissioners with actionable strategies to address climate change. It will include region-specific modules—covering coastal, plain, arid, hilly, and northeastern districts—with custom adaptation and mitigation pathways. Best practices, case studies, and implementation frameworks will guide decision-making.

Context: Western and southern Odisha rely on rain-fed farming, where women are the primary agricultural workforce. They face persistent hurdles: lack of inputs, limited mechanization, and climate vulnerability. Despite MGNREGA and subsidies, households remain trapped in cycles of low productivity and distress migration.

Challenge: Rural livelihoods in Odisha lack resilience and inclusivity. Strategies are needed to ensure reliable employment, strengthen women farmers’ access to finance, and reduce migration. Current interventions often fail to address the specific needs of female workers and marginalized households in these regions.

Description: This project designs policy recommendations to strengthen agriculture linked livelihoods in Odisha. It maps gaps in skills and financial inclusion while exploring non farm diversification. The focus is on women workers, ensuring digital systems and technology act as enablers to improve productivity and provide sustainable income pathways.

Context: Exports contributed 22% to India’s GDP in 2023–24, yet most states lack dedicated promotion policies. Uttar Pradesh recently framed a structured Export Promotion Policy 2025–30 with sectoral focus and district planning. Capturing this process can guide other states to adopt similar frameworks, ensuring balanced and sustainable export growth across India.

Challenge: National trade policies provide direction, but state frameworks remain fragmented. Most states lack a clear institutional architecture to identify district level export champions or link industry with logistics. Without replicable models, India risks uneven development and missed global opportunities in critical international markets.

Description: This project designs an Export Promotion Policy Framework based on the UP model. It analyzes sectoral strengths, logistics, and institutional gaps across sample states. The framework integrates best practices in market diversification and digital facilitation, providing a roadmap for states to operationalize export promotion as a mission mode program.

Context: Over 4.85 crore Farmer IDs, out of the targeted 11 crore by 2026-27, have been generated under AgriStack (PIB, March 2025), offering a unique data spine to transform service delivery. Yet, this rich data remains underutilized for insights-driven policymaking at state and district levels.

Challenge: While urban departments use integrated data for real-time decision-making, agri-departments often lack tools or capacity to analyze and apply Farmer ID data. This limits visibility into farmer needs, policy performance, and inclusion gaps.

Description: This project will develop a model dashboard for Farmer ID which will help in delivering targeted awareness campaigns to improve understanding and adoption of Agri ID among farmers. The focus will be on building trust, demonstrating use cases, and creating localized, inclusive communication tools.

Context: India implements large-scale mission-mode health programs like TB elimination and Mission Indradhanush to achieve rapid public health outcomes. While these missions aim for measurable success, results vary due to design flaws, weak accountability, and poor inter-departmental integration. This limits their effectiveness in achieving national social targets.

Challenge: Missions are frequently siloed, leading to coordination gaps. Accountability is weak, as frontline workers often lack the resources or authority to match their delivery expectations. While data dashboards exist, they often fail to trigger adaptive action, leaving policies on paper rather than producing reliable results at scale.

Description: This project applies systems thinking to evaluate and redesign health missions. Learners will study 3-4 flagship programs to map stakeholder architecture, accountability cascades, and feedback loops. The project develops a playbook of design principles and diagnostics, providing a repeatable framework for strengthening health governance and program delivery.