As part of an initiative named as Zero Investment Innovation in Education Initiative, HDFC Bank has entered into a partnership with Sri Aurobindo Society to train 4 lakh school teachers in Uttar Pradesh. According to the bank, the Department of Basic and Secondary Education of UP government also is involved in the initiative and has signed an MoU with Sri Aurobindo Society. The program will first familiarize more than 4 lakh government school teachers to ‘innovation’ as a concept, and then facilitate implementation of zero-investment ideas in thousands of schools every year. The training will give teachers a holistic view of the changes required in the existing education curriculum to make it contemporary and relevant, the bank said. According to the bank, the first-of-its-kind initiative is a part of the bank’s sustained endeavour to improve the lives of the local populace through its CSR programme. In the first leg over two lakh teachers have already been trained who have come up with about 50,000 innovative ideas. The top 25 of these will be selected and be implemented in 40,000 schools across the state. Teachers, whose ideas have been selected, will receive training and monetary support to refine before it is implemented in the schools. To refine the idea for scalability, two centers of Excellence for Innovation are being set up in Varanasi and Lucknow. Along with the teachers, schools which encourage and implement these ideas will also receive recognition and rewards from the state government, it said.
