While much of Jammu is chasing shade this July, more than 220 city college students have chosen to spend their summer learning how to build a business from scratch. The Jammu & Kashmir Entrepreneurship Development Institute (JKEDI) has begun its Summer Internship Programme for 227 undergraduate students from SPMR College of Commerce, Jammu — a ten-day, 60-hour crash course in entrepreneurship, innovation and the startup ecosystem.
For a generation that keeps hearing that a degree alone no longer guarantees a job, this is exactly the kind of hands-on exposure that can tilt the odds. Instead of another summer of scrolling, these commerce undergraduates are being walked through how ideas actually become enterprises — and how to make themselves more employable in the process.
What the programme looks like
The internship is being run across two locations. Of the 227 participants, 188 students are training at JKEDI’s Regional Office in Bari Brahmana, while 39 are based at the JKEDI District Centre in Jammu. The cohort has been split into seven batches so that sessions stay small enough for genuine interaction rather than a lecture-hall blur.
Over 60 contact hours, students move through interactive sessions, practical assignments, field exposure and expert interactions. The syllabus is built around the fundamentals that most classroom commerce courses skip: entrepreneurship development, startup promotion, business planning, innovation, and the institutional support mechanisms available to first-time founders. JKEDI faculty members and resource persons are attached to each batch as coordinators and mentors, guiding participants through experiential learning activities rather than theory alone.
The institute says the programme is designed in alignment with the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, which places a heavy emphasis on skill development, innovation and industry-oriented learning. In practice, that means the internship is less about memorising definitions of ‘entrepreneurship’ and more about understanding how a business plan is stress-tested, how a startup accesses funding and mentorship, and where a young founder in J&K can actually go for help.
Why it matters for Jammu’s youth
Youth unemployment and under-employment remain among the most talked-about issues for young people across Jammu and Kashmir. Programmes like this one matter because they attack the problem from two sides at once. For students who dream of launching something of their own, the internship demystifies the startup journey and connects them to JKEDI’s wider ecosystem of schemes and hand-holding. For those who intend to take up jobs, the same skills — planning, problem-solving, communication and comfort with ambiguity — are precisely what employers now screen for.
The institute frames the initiative as a way to “provide experiential learning opportunities, entrepreneurial exposure, understanding of the startup ecosystem and skill development among students,” and says it hopes participants will start seeing entrepreneurship as a serious career option rather than a fallback. That shift in mindset — from job-seeker to potential job-creator — is arguably the most valuable thing a 20-year-old can take away from a summer like this.
Who is running it
The Summer Internship Programme is being conducted under the leadership of JKEDI Director Mohammad Younis Malik and Joint Director Chand Kishore Sharma. JKEDI, the J&K government’s nodal institute for entrepreneurship and startups, has been steadily expanding these short-format internships in recent years, drawing students from government colleges across the Jammu division into its Bari Brahmana and Jammu centres.
The tie-up with SPMR College of Commerce is a natural fit: commerce students already study accounting, business organisation and economics, and the internship gives that classroom knowledge a real-world edge. By the end of the ten days, participants are expected to walk away not just with a certificate, but with a clearer sense of how the startup pipeline works — from an idea on paper to a registered venture.
The bigger picture
Jammu’s startup and skilling scene has been gathering momentum, with institutions from JKEDI to IIM Jammu running entrepreneurship development programmes aimed squarely at young innovators. Each cohort that passes through adds to a slowly growing base of students who have at least tried building something — and who know where to turn when they want to try again.
For the 227 students now sitting in JKEDI’s Bari Brahmana and Jammu classrooms, the payoff may not be immediate. But a summer spent learning how to spot an opportunity, write a plan and pitch an idea is rarely a summer wasted. If even a handful of them go on to launch ventures that employ others in the city, this quiet ten-day programme will have done more for Jammu’s youth than its low-key rollout suggests.
Sources: Kashmir Reader · The Publish · The Global Kashmir
