School Innovation Council (SIC), an initiative taken by the Ministry of Education’s Innovation Cell (MIC) was launched on 1 July 2022 and has been introduced to all schools of all the states including Rajasthan. It is a council of teachers, students, and experts from industry and academia to conduct round the year activities for students and teachers on Innovation and Entrepreneurship, monitored through the SIC portal of the MIC, to record the influence at the ground level.

SIC will enable mindset change, awareness, and training on Ideation, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, design thinking, Intellectual Property Rights, start-up finance, and HR among teachers and students. It will also enable the ranking system for schools on the level of innovation-oriented activities.

To implement the SIC council in all schools across the nation, SIC portal has been developed where schools can register themselves. All registered schools are encouraged to perform innovation-related activities as per the SIC Calendar Activities that includes Leadership talk, motivation sessions, webinars, sessions, awareness, boot camps inviting innovative ideas from the student, developing the prototype, and national level exhibition of the best prototypes etc. (for complete info refer section XI in SIC document under download section, https://sic.mic.gov.in/).

NEP 2020 envisages the education system to include a ‘light but tight’ regulatory framework to ensure integrity, transparency, and resource efficiency of the educational system through audit and public disclosure while encouraging innovation and out-of-the-box ideas through autonomy, good governance, and empowerment. Besides, NEP has a provision for School Complex Management Committees for more robust and improved governance, monitoring, oversight, innovations and initiatives by local stakeholders.

In order to strengthen the mentoring capacity of teachers for cultivating and handholding innovative and ingenious ideas from students, the School Innovation Ambassador Training program (SIATP) was launched through online Mode. Under SIATP, teachers undergo 72 hours of training, and those who qualify all the five modules i.e. 1. Design Thinking & Innovation;  2. Idea generation & Idea hand-holding; 3. Finance/Sales/HR; 4. Intellectual Property Rights(IPR); 5. Entrepreneurship and Prototype/ Product Development;  with a minimum 50% as passing marks are recognized as “Innovation Ambassadors” which makes them competent to nurture the young school students on Ideation, IPR, product development, design thinking, problem-solving, critical thinking and skills of entrepreneurship.

The information was given by the Minister of State for Education, Smt. Annpurna Devi in a written reply in the Lok Sabha today.

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MJPS/AK

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