The Urban Learning Internship Program (TULIP)

• Ministry of Human Resource Development, Ministry of Housing & Urban Affairs, and All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) have jointly launched an online portal for `The Urban Learning Internship Program (TULIP)’ - A program for providing internship opportunities to fresh graduates in all Urban Local Bodies (ULBs) and Smart Cities across the country.

About The Urban Learning Internship Program (TULIP)

• TULIP is a program for providing fresh graduates with experiential learning opportunities in the urban sector.
• TULIP has been conceived pursuant to the Budget 2020-21 announcement by Finance Minister Smt. Nirmala Sitharaman under the theme ‘Aspirational India’.
• The announcement read as follows: “The Government proposes to start a program whereby the urban local bodies across the country would provide internship opportunities to fresh engineers for a period up to one year.”

Importance of TULIP

• Such a program will help reap the benefits of India’s demographic dividend as it is poised to have the largest working-age population in the world in the coming years.
• General education may not reflect the depth of productive knowledge present in society. Instead of approaching education as ‘doing by learning,’ our societies need to reimagine education as ‘learning by doing.’
• TULIP would help enhance the value-to-market of India’s graduates and help create a potential talent pool in diverse fields like urban planning, transport engineering, environment, municipal finance etc. thus not only catalyzing the creation of prospective city managers but also talented private/ non-government sector professionals.
• TULIP would benefit ULBs and smart cities immensely.
• It will lead to the infusion of fresh ideas and energy with the engagement of youth in the co-creation of solutions for solving India’s urban challenges.
• More importantly, it will further Government’s endeavours to boost community partnership and government- academia-industry-civil society linkages.
• Thus TULIP- “The Urban Learning Internship Program” would help fulfil twin goals of providing interns with a hands-on learning experience as well as infusing fresh energy and ideas into the functioning of India’s ULBs and Smart Cities.
• This launch is also an important stepping stone for the fulfilment of MHRD and AICTE’s goal of 1 crore successful internships by the year 2025.
• The digital platform powering TULIP enables discovery, engagement, aggregation, amplification and transparency.
• Technical support for the platform shall be anchored by AICTE and the programmatic non-technical support shall be anchored by MoHUA.
• A Steering Committee under the Chairmanship of Secretary, HUA including Chairman AICTE and other officials from MoHUA and AICTE has also been constituted to review the progress of the program on a periodical basis.

Way ahead

• MoHUA would reach out to State Governments to help boost internships in their cities. It will undertake capacity-building initiatives in partnerships with State Governments to enable the participation of ULBs and smart cities under TULIP.
• As States & UTs have a deeper understanding of the regional challenges and opportunities at the urban level, they can effectively implement TULIP by matching their needs with skills developed through such internships.
• State Governments/Union Territories are also urged to explore scaling up TULIP to parastatal agencies/ State Financial intermediaries and other organizations/ agencies related to urban development in their respective jurisdictions.