This article explores how young elite urban professionals and fresh graduates in Mumbai and Delhi are charting new professional mobilities through volunteering opportunities at a corporate-supported non-governmental organisation (NGO), the Teach for India (TFI) programme.
Author
Vidya Subramanian, Assistant Professor, Jindal School of Government and Public Policy, O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, Haryana, India.
Summary
This article explores how young elite urban professionals and fresh graduates in Mumbai and Delhi are fostering diverse aspirations of service, entrepreneurship and charting new professional mobilities through volunteering opportunities at a well-known corporate-supported non-governmental organisation (NGO), the Teach for India (TFI) programme.
Mostly with commerce, engineering and management educational backgrounds, the TFI intervention operates as a nodal site for these elite youth to not just serve underprivileged children through ‘acts of compassion’ but also channel their experiences to understand the education system and reinvigorate it through corporate management values of enterprise and performance.
Through examining the trajectories of these individuals, I foreground the nascent terrain of technocratic expertise being shaped through an interlinked collective of corporate NGOs that have become prominent in advising the Delhi state government, under the leadership of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), to improve public education through discourses of enterprise and performance.
Published in: Contemporary South Asia
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