By Dr. Kiran Pai
Every university is built twice. The first time, by its founders, through its faculty, curriculum, culture and institutional choices. The second time, by its graduates, through what they choose to create in the world. The second construction is ultimately the more consequential one.
As India marks another Independence Day, this distinction deserves attention. We often discuss Atmanirbhar Bharat through manufacturing capacity, domestic technology, capital and infrastructure. Each is essential. But self-reliance is also a question of human capability: are young people equipped merely to participate in systems designed by others, or can they improve those systems and build alternatives of their own?
Beyond placement
For universities, this question cannot be answered by placement figures alone. Securing meaningful employment is an important outcome of education, and India needs capable professionals who can contribute to existing organisations. But a university’s ambition cannot end with supplying talent to the economy as it exists. It should also prepare graduates to see what the economy is missing.
A builder is not necessarily someone who starts a company immediately after graduation. Builders can work inside businesses, public institutions, research organisations or communities. What distinguishes them is a particular form of agency. They do not approach a system only by asking where they fit. They notice where value is being lost, where people are being underserved and where a better solution can be created.
The meaningful distinction, therefore, is not simply between an entrepreneur and an employee. It is between passive participation and productive agency.
This matters particularly in a country as complex as India. Many of our most consequential opportunities lie at the intersection of technology and lived reality: public services that must operate across languages, healthcare systems working at enormous scale, mobility challenges shaped by human behaviour, agricultural processes awaiting practical innovation, and communities whose needs rarely arrive as neatly framed problem statements.
A self-reliant India is not one that turns away from knowledge developed elsewhere. It is one that can evaluate that knowledge independently, adapt it intelligently and create solutions suited to its own realities. The confidence to learn globally and build locally is a more meaningful expression of self-reliance than isolation could ever be.
Building for Indian realities
The graduation of Vidyashilp University’s founding cohort gave us an early opportunity to see what this idea could mean in practice.
Students worked on an artificial-intelligence and machine-learning system designed to convert voice complaints into categorised tickets for an Indian Railways use case. Another team developed a predictive model for GST analytics. A student also applied engineering thinking to the challenge of tamarind harvesting.
These were very different problems, yet they required a common instinct: to look at a familiar system and ask whether it could work better.
They also demonstrated why technology alone is rarely the complete answer. A voice complaint involves language, user behaviour and institutional workflow. A model for taxation data must be understood in relation to economic activity, administrative processes and the decisions its output is expected to support. An agricultural tool cannot be separated from affordability, physical conditions and the experience of those expected to use it.
The significance of such work does not lie in suggesting that an undergraduate prototype has already transformed a national system. It lies in what students learn when they attempt to solve a problem beyond the controlled boundaries of a classroom. They discover that technical sophistication does not automatically create usefulness. A solution can function perfectly and still fail in implementation if it misunderstands its context.
Making innovation a habit
Universities often try to encourage innovation by organising competitions, establishing incubators or adding entrepreneurship courses. These initiatives can be valuable, but innovation cannot survive as an extracurricular layer placed over conventional education. It must shape a student’s relationship with knowledge itself.
Students should not experience knowledge as a finished inheritance to be consumed, reproduced in examinations and exchanged for a credential. They should encounter it as material they can question, combine, test and extend.
This becomes even more important in the age of artificial intelligence. AI can already produce information, code, images and plausible answers at remarkable speed. As these capabilities improve, familiarity with a particular tool will offer diminishing advantage. Universities cannot keep redesigning degrees around every new technology, nor can they promise that any technical skill will remain permanently relevant.
What can endure is the capacity to identify the right problem, question an assumption, learn independently, connect ideas across disciplines and exercise judgement when no established answer is adequate.
An education designed for builders must offer disciplinary depth without allowing specialisation to become intellectual confinement. It should expose students to ambiguity before their careers do. They should learn to work with people who think differently, communicate with those who do not share their technical vocabulary and consider the consequences of what they create.
They must also be allowed to fail intelligently. If every academic task is structured around arriving at a predetermined answer, students learn to avoid uncertainty. Building something new requires the opposite disposition: the confidence to begin without complete information, the humility to revise an idea and the resilience to continue when the first attempt does not work.
The community as a classroom
The environment surrounding a university has an important role here. A campus should not function as an island whose relationship with its location ends at its address. The communities, enterprises, civic institutions and public systems around it can become part of the learning environment.
Before attempting to solve a problem, students need to understand where they are, listen to those who experience it and recognise the limits of their own assumptions.
When students can see the effects of their work in an immediate environment, impact stops being an abstract promise. It becomes a responsibility. They learn that communities are not laboratories created for academic experimentation, but partners whose knowledge must inform any meaningful intervention.
This proximity also changes how students see their own potential. They begin to understand that meaningful innovation need not always begin with a distant market or a grand technological idea. It can begin by noticing an unresolved problem in the community immediately around them.
From ideas to livelihoods
The same mindset can eventually support enterprise creation. India does not need every graduate to establish a start-up. It does, however, need many more young people to consider creating an enterprise, a product or a new form of work as a plausible path, rather than an exceptional one reserved for a small group of natural entrepreneurs.
For that to happen, entrepreneurship cannot be taught only through pitch decks or the pursuit of investment. Students must learn how value is identified, how trust is earned, how teams are formed and how an idea survives contact with a market or community. Building an enterprise is ultimately an exercise in solving a problem well enough that others can participate in the value created.
When graduates create viable enterprises, they do more than secure livelihoods for themselves. They generate work, strengthen local economies and expand the range of solutions available to society. This is where education becomes directly connected to national capacity.
Economic growth is not produced only by a handful of celebrated founders or transformative inventions. It is also created by people who make the systems they enter work better: an engineer who reduces friction in public infrastructure, a manager who redesigns an inefficient process, a researcher who gives visibility to an overlooked problem, or a creative practitioner who generates new value from cultural knowledge. These are all acts of building.
Preparing graduates to shape change
A university cannot predict precisely what its graduates will be doing twenty years from now. It can, however, decide whether they leave believing that their role is merely to adapt to change or that they are capable of shaping it. The first conviction produces employable graduates. The second can produce innovators, enterprise creators and citizens who strengthen the places in which they live and work. India will need both competence and imagination, but it is imagination combined with the ability to act that turns demographic potential into national capability.
Atmanirbhar Bharat will not be built only in factories, laboratories, start-ups or government missions. It will also be built in the moment a graduate encounters an imperfect system and asks a question that education should have prepared them to ask:
What can I build here?
Dr Kiran Pai is Managing Director of Vidyashilp Education Group and Co-Founder and Pro-Chancellor of Vidyashilp University.
DISCLAIMER: The views expressed are solely of the author and ETEDUCATION does not necessarily subscribe to it. ETEDUCATION will not be responsible for any damage caused to any person or organisation directly or indirectly.
