Piramal Fellowship Programme, also known as the Gandhi Fellowship Programme, is an intensive two-year residential programme that helps talented young individuals to develop leadership skills necessary to bring positive changes in the society. The fellowship challenges young people to support primary school headmasters in transforming their schools. The application process closes on March 31, 2016.
Eligibility: Any graduate, student in final year of post-graduation or young professional under age of 25 can apply for the fellowship.

Selection Process: Application by email, telephonic interview and final personal interview.

Rewards: Monthly stipend of INR 7000 for two years along with other allowances. Also, INR 160000 will be provided as seed money at the end of the programme.

Applicants can register themselves on http://apply.gandhifellowship.org/register_applicant1516.aspx.

Piramal Foundation for Educational Leadership (PFEL) is an organisation set up with the main objective of facilitating professional development of education leaders across the country and imparting specialised training to them to make positive changes in their schools to deliver better quality of education. With the help of various education promotion schemes, PFEL wishes to make an impactful change in the quality of primary education in India by creating and replicating a sustainable programme for grooming education leaders in the government school system across India, in partnership with the government and relevant agencies.

PFEL runs two programmes for work in this direction – the Principal Leadership Development Program (PLDP) and Piramal Fellowship Program (PFP)

A. Principal Leadership Development Program (PLDP)

PFEL believes that there is a need for inculcating the ‘right’ mindsets, leadership skills and imparting relevant knowledge to school principals, in order to positively impact the quality of education in schools. This implies that they think of the necessary components required for a child to learn effectively, create a vision for schools, manage stakeholders and solve problems, effectively conduct reviews and assessments – things that, in PFEL’s experience, are a pre-requisite for improvement in student performance.

Based on the above understanding, the PLDP is implemented as a 3-year Leadership Development Programme to provide holistic training and development to school leaders to improve learning quality in their schools. It initiates principals of primary government schools to experientially understand and develop skills to more effectively manage and lead their schools.

B. Piramal Fellowship Program (PFP)

The Piramal Fellowship Programme is an intense 24-month youth leadership development programme that helps talented young people to develop the skills to create positive, exponential and lasting change in society.

During the 24 months, fellows work as ‘Sahyogis’ to 5 school principals each. They bring problem solving skills, positivity, creativity to grass-root issues such as teacher motivation, community school relationships and the school leaders own sense of identity and purpose.

By taking on real world challenges and solving live problems that exist in India, Piramal Fellows discover themselves – what they are passionate about, what they want to do with their lives and how to go about converting their private dreams into public reality. This intense personal change process will, hopefully help them become the next generation change leaders, thus enabling them to realise their potential and cause sustainable and systemic change.

Piramal fellows are recruited from the best institutions across India including IIT, Xavier’s, Presidency, Lady Shri Ram College, Miranda House and others. After the fellowship, fellows take on senior positions in reputed corporate or non-profit organisations, choose to study further, join civil services or start their own projects.

Programme design

The twin key components of the program – PLDP and PFP – heavily focus on encouraging self-change in the target group and leveraging it to cause change in their respective areas of responsibility. Both programmes are intricately linked as Piramal Fellows are appointed to provide on-field and coaching to the PLDP principals. This, in turn, allows them the opportunity to develop their own skills and perspective as young leaders by learning to influence people and solve live complex problems to create positive impact. Both programmes, however, have their own distinct processes to bring about this change.

The PLDP attempts to build school principal capacity in school leadership across four aspects of leadership in an integrated manner:

I. Personal Leadership: focuses on developing intrinsic motivation, self-awareness and ability to critically analyse experiences and shift own mindsets.

II. Instructional Leadership: focuses on improving teaching and learning processes and encouraging adoption of child-centred, activity-based teaching and learning.

III. Institutional Leadership: focuses on the school as system and incorporates working with teachers, improving administration processes, relationships with government officials, etc.

IV. Social Leadership: focuses on getting parents and community involved in the education of their children, encouraging enrolment and ongoing participation within the education system and addressing barriers which inhibit the former.

The Piramal Fellowship is a two year, full-time, residential leadership programme that helps talented young people to develop the skills to cause positive, exponential and lasting change in society. Fellows’ learning and development is aided by major processes including Village Immersion, Academic Support Programme, Learning Journey and Personal Reflection & Vipassana, Assessment Centres and High Potential Talent Programme.

The primary stakeholders of the PFEL programme are the 787 government school principals enrolled in PLDP to develop their skills as school leaders, and more importantly, the students who PFEL envisions as the beneficiaries of this progress by being provided better quality of education in public schools. Also benefitting from the PLDP are government officials in the education department being trained as resource persons to create a sustainable pipeline of mentors within the government system. Additionally, over 160 young leaders selected for the Piramal Fellowship are another key stakeholder for the PFEL.

PFEL’s advocacy initiatives also see engagement with other stakeholders via forums and committees to take forward the work on education leadership. Besides working with National Council for School Leadership (NCSL) and 5 state governments, PFEL is also closely associated with the Harvard Graduate School of Education, as the South Asia hub, in order to develop the best curriculum across the world for 21st century skills. PFEL has also tied up with New York University in order to develop the best ways of assessing these skills.