Shivesh (left) & Kapur: embedded entrepreneurship education

Alumnae of IIT-Delhi, Sanjeeva Shivesh and Shivani Singh Kapur are co-founders of ThinkStartup Learning Pvt. Ltd (TSL, estb.2020), a Delhi-based education company providing structured entrepreneurship education programmes to K-12 schools. To date TSL has signed up 45 schools in seven cities to nurture innovation, problem-solving and entrepreneurial skills of classes VI-XII students who are mentored by a 50-member team including 40 trained facilitators.

Newspeg. On October 6, TSL launched the 5th edition of the School Youth Ideathon (SYI), India’s largest entrepreneurship festival for school students at CBSE Headquarters, New Delhi. Promoted in association with the Management & Entrepreneurship and Professional Skills Council (MEPSC), the Grand Finale of this competitive event will be held at IIT-Delhi on January 18.

History. An alumnus of IIT-Delhi and Cranfield School of Management (UK), Sanjeeva Shivesh began his career with the Indian Railways after clearing the civil services examination (IRAS) in 1996. In 2005, when he had risen to the position of Deputy Financial Advisor, Shivesh resigned to pursue higher studies in the UK where he worked for two years as a management consultant. On returning to India in 2009, he promoted a consultancy — Smart Wave Education, and in 2013 established The Entrepreneurship School, through which he has mentored over 20,000 school and college students through more than 800 nascent startups.

Equally well-qualified — an IIT-Delhi and IIM-Calcutta graduate — Shivani Singh Kapur who began her professional career in 1996 with the blue-chip Infosys Technologies as a Key Account Manager. After a ten-year stint with Infosys, she discovered that her true interest was education and in 2008, co-founded Intellitots Learning, aka FirstCry Intellitots, a chain of holistic preschools and daycare centres which has since evolved into one of India’s largest preschool chains with many of its pre-primaries ranked high in the annual EducationWorld India Preschool Rankings. After a short stint at the Bengaluru-based Founding Years Learning Solutions Pvt. Ltd, she co-founded TSL with Shivesh in 2020.

Direct talk. “After years of interacting with students and schools, we realised that entrepreneurship cannot be taught as an extracurricular activity; it has to be embedded into mainstream school education,” says Shivesh. “Therefore we designed an experiential learning, mentorship and real-world exposure curriculum that enables students to ideate, prototype and think independently.”

Adds Kapur: “The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 accords high priority to innovation and entrepreneurship through mandating a National Innovation and Entrepreneurship Promotion Policy. This has helped school managements and parents to appreciate the importance of entrepreneurship education.”

Since then over the past five years, the annual School Youth Ideathon, supported by CBSE and MEPSC, has emerged as TSL’s flagship initiative. In 2024, over 200,000 students registered for it and 52,000 newly ideated projects were submitted for evaluation by a jury of experts. Of them 20 ideathon projects are under incubation currently.

Future plans. Encouraged by enthusiastic student response to the annual ideathon, Shivesh and Kapur have drawn up plans to scale TSL’s reach and deepen its impact nationwide. “India’s school system is still rooted in a mindset that values conformity over creativity,” says Shivesh. “Government initiatives such as Startup India, Make in India and Atal Tinkering Labs have helped unfreeze the conversation around entrepreneurship. But schools must play a much larger role in promoting entrepreneurship and innovation if India is to achieve its Viksit Bharat and $30 trillion GDP growth by 2047.”

Adds Kapur: “It’s high time path-breaking innovations emerged from India. We believe every student is a potential change-maker. A multiplier effect is necessary for India to achieve the PM’s Viksit Bharat and $30 trillion goals.”

Autar Nehru (Delhi)