Few Below Poverty line (BPl) adolescent girls of the State capital will soon get the chance of learning management skills through mobile games which would help them in grasping the knowledge on social entrepreneurship. Thanks to United States of America’s (USA) Purdue University that has identified these girls for the purpose of ‘girl empowerment’.
A team of eight members comprising four teachers and four students from Purdue University, who reached Ranchi on October 4, visited four villages including Cheri, Namkum, Ratu and one of the Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalaya in order to understand the challenges and needs of the target audience for this yet to launch mobile game.
“The games depicting Panchatantra ambience and characters would include lessons on management like business concept and supply chain management. Through this ancient Indian inter-related collection of animal fables they would easily learn managerial skills at a young age,” Purdue University’s Professor of Management Dr Alok R Chaturvedi said on Wednesday.
Being a resident of Ranchi, this Professor thought of selecting Ranchi as the first research arena for this pilot project. He said, “This is a long-term plan of around 12 months. We have consulted Indian Institute of Management, Ranchi (IM-R) and State Department of Social Welfare on this mobile training module. Various local universities, corporations and government departments are also being approached who would reach out to our audience and train them about entrepreneurship.”
Presently social entrepreneurship is an important field in business (B) schools of USA. “To take the way forward via certain exchange programmes we are here,” added Dr Alok.
The mobile game is known to be the brain child of multi-disciplinary scholars of Purdue University.
Meanwhile, IIM-R is helping the foreign cradle in this project through its Barefoot Manager program which aims at retaining people in their rural settings thereby helping them to contribute towards regional development. Faculties related to this program assisted Dr Alok and his group to Cheri village yesterday.
Since IIM-R’s campus is being constructed at this location and the B-school has pledged to work for rural upliftment this moment, the visit was a moment to remember for the people linked with Barefoot Manager program.
Dr Ayse Ciftci, Associate Professor of Education from Purdue University accompanying Dr Alok informed that such mobile games accessible on cell phones, smart phones and tabs would give a voice to girls.
She said, “The tribal and other girls of this region seemed eager to learn the special mobile game. Hopefully, we will be able to connect them with this digitization idea.”
The team also met State Social Welfare Principal Secretary Mridula Sinha who assured her full support to this pilot project. After Ranchi this team is mulling to do similar research at South Africa’s city Cape Town.