iFEEL Students Bag Gold Medal at AIMS–WeSchool Innovation Awards

The project on increasing the health standards among school children of Ekvira Devi School in Karla village was started in September 2012, as students of iFEEL, an upcoming Business School in the vicinity, had come across various problems related to health, hygiene and nutrition/midday meals served at the school. The young MBA students were appalled to discover that there were no toilets for boys and the two toilets meant for girls were in a pathetic condition. The kitchen where the midday meals were cooked was in disarray, the meals lacked nutritional value and they were served in unhygienic surroundings. These conditions resulted from the lack of awareness of hygiene in the local community which emerged as the main problem behind the poor health condition of the students in the school. Thus, HNA Project- Hygiene, Nutrition and Awareness was born. The team consisting of Harshit Shah, Shweta Mamania, Meet Patel, Firoz Khan, Advaitha Bandanatham, Prashant Jadhav, and Amit Patil devised a plan under the guidance and mentorship of Prof Sudhir Salunkhe and worked ceaselessly to execute it with the support of the local community leaders, school authorities, teachers and students. The effort resulted in a well designed toilet block that was built under the supervision of the team, a neat, clean and organized kitchen and well trained staff that cooked and delivered nutritional meals and better awareness about health and hygiene among students through talks, essay competitions and debates. The set of continuous activities impacted the dropout rate of girls, provided nutritious meals for the children, and improved their performance in curricular and co-curricular activities. This initiative brought fresh winds of change in the rural community that helped in mentoring the educated and healthy citizens of the future.

Harshit and the team presented this story with the mirthful mixture of Aesop’s famous fable of the hare and the tortoise that gives the message that if tortoise could win the race, so could you. But the iFEEL story had a twist. Having realized the futility of competing against each other and wasting their resources to create nothing but animosity and frustration, the hare and tortoise did some thinking together and decided to run one last race , but to run it as a team this time. As the race took off, the hare carried the tortoise till the riverbank. Then the tortoise took over and swam across carrying the hare on its back. Once on the the opposite side, the hare took over again and both of them reached the finishing line together amidst a thunderous applause from their counterparts in the forest.

The moral of the story? Teamwork really does work. It's good to be individually brilliant; but unless one is able to work with a bunch with opposable minds and learn to harness each other's strengths, one will always perform below par because somewhere you'll do poorly and someone else will do better. Neither the tortoise and hare need to give up after failures. In life, when faced with failure, sometimes one needs to work harder and put in more effort. And there are times when one needs to change strategy and try something out-of-the box. And sometimes there is need to do both. One may always be working hard but never winning the race. Maybe it's time to look back and change the strategy. But the greatest lesson learnt here was that in terms of building value, the power of a team is very important. The members of the community are either tortoises or hares, but if we work together, we can win the race. Highly value the power of leverage, of forming teams and creating win-win situations.

The innovative methods used, efforts put in by the iFEEL team and the outcome – that brought a positive and sustainable change in the rural community won the hearts of the jury that consisted of deans and directors of leading MBA Schools and won the team the coveted gold medal at the AIMS-WeSchool Innovation awards at the annual AIMS conference recently. While the students won in the Innovation awards category, the school won the AIMS Dr Dharni Sinha award for social responsibility. This is extremely encouraging as on one side one reads about the number of vacant seats in MBA schools and the schools closing down especially in the rural areas, here is a school with a modest beginning but has great dreams and aspirations.

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Institute For Future Education, Entrepreneurship And Leadership (iFEEL), (estb. 2010), a B-School with the belief that entrepreneurship and leadership are critical to India’s prosperity, economic development and social equality across all levels of society. the institute located at

Karla with the picturesque Sahaydri hills as its backdrop, has a fully wi-fi campus, conference and seminar halls, a rain lab, well equipped library, open air amphitheater, cafeteria, hostel accommodation and student activity areas that include a volleyball court, a cricket and football ground, jogging tracks, a yoga zone and large open areas for outdoor games apart from indoor games. Though modest in size, this upcoming b-school has the vision to develop and nurture leadership and entrepreneurship excellence.

For more information, please see: http://www.ifeel.edu.in/