On the occasion of the International Day of Women and Girls in Science on February 11, 2021, the second phase of the Vigyan Jyoti programme has commenced.
Key Points
- This programme will encourage the girls to take interest in science and build a career in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) to 50 more districts adding to the existing 50 districts across the country.
- This programme would improve by learnings of the last one year and expand to more and more districts of the country for empowering women and to help in increasing the number of women in top science institutes.
- Under-representation of women is a problem that needs to be solved at the earliest.
- The New Education Policy and the Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy can make use of the demographic dividend and remove the constraints to progress better in a short time by increasing the number of women in science.
Vigyan Jyoti Programme
Vigyan Jyoti programme was launched by the Department of Science & Technology (DST). The main aim of the initiative is to encourage girls to take interest in science and to create a platform for meritorious girls to pursue STEM. It had been running successfully in 50 Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas (JNV) since December 2019 and has now been expanded to 50 more JNVs for the year 2021-22.
In the initial phase, the programme has been started at the school level for meritorious girls of Class IX to Class XII in reputed institutions of the country.
Vigyan Jyoti activities include visits to labs and knowledge centres, student-parent counselling, science camps, partners role model interactions, resource material distribution, academic support classes, and tinkering activities.