While much of student Jammu spends June indoors, 229 students across the Jammu division have spent it building something more useful than a tan. The J&K Entrepreneurship Development Institute (JKEDI) has wrapped up its Summer Internship Programme, handing undergraduates from colleges across the division a hands-on, practical grounding in entrepreneurship and skilling — and, just as importantly, the confidence to imagine building rather than only applying.
What the interns actually got
The programme, run through JKEDI’s regional and district centres in the Jammu division, is deliberately practical rather than theoretical. Over an intensive stretch, participants are walked through the real machinery of starting up — business planning, startup promotion, the support systems and institutional schemes that aspiring founders can actually tap — the kind of nuts-and-bolts knowledge that classrooms rarely teach and that demystifies entrepreneurship for students who had only ever seen it from the outside.
It is also pitched squarely in line with the National Education Policy’s emphasis on skill development, innovation and experiential learning — a signal that hands-on, do-it-yourself exposure is being treated as core to a degree, not a holiday extra.
Why the number matters
Two hundred and twenty-nine is not a headline-grabbing figure, and that is rather the point. A self-reliance pipeline is not built by one viral success story; it is built by cohort after cohort of ordinary students quietly learning that a livelihood can be created and not only sought. Every batch that finishes is a few hundred more young people in the Jammu division who now know how an idea becomes an enterprise — and who might, a few years out, be the ones doing the hiring.
For any student who missed this round, the takeaway is simple: programmes like this reward initiative over pedigree, the windows are short, and the ones who benefit are the ones paying attention when registration opens. This summer, 229 of your peers were. The smartest thing you can do is make sure you are on that list the next time it comes around.
The quiet math of self-reliance: 229 students, one summer, a habit of building instead of only applying. That compounds.
