Internship for undergraduate students, mandatory under NEP, remains a challenge for West Bengal colleges

Colleges in West Bengal are struggling to meet a new requirement under the recently implemented National Education Policy (NEP), which is mandatory internship to be undertaken by all students in order to get a degree.
As the policy, implemented in 2023, a student can exit college at any time — after a year, two years, or after finishing the full course — but not without doing an internship. This is turning out to be a challenge for colleges with many practical problems cropping up.
'While the NEP document makes the internship sound like an exciting world of opportunities, including interning with a farmer or a shopkeeper to get hands on training, many practical problems are raising their heads. What can be the relevant fields for a student of literature to intern in? Are they just the traditional fields such as teaching or journalism, or can content creation also become a field to intern in? Our colleges and universities do not have the resources to place all their students as interns, and some organisations are even charging money from the interns, instead of paying them,' Samata Biswas, professor of English at the Sanskrit College and University, said.
Also read | Budget 2024: Internship scheme with ₹5,000 monthly allowance announced for one crore youth
Some colleges are being optimistic about it. Jaydeep Sarangi, principal of Kolkata's New Alipore College, said: 'Earlier, classroom teaching was all. Now, training, certificate courses, internships and placement drives are equally important. In our college, for example, students are trained to prepare soap, phenol, sanitizer, floor cleaners, etc. as part of their internship so that they can stand on their own feet. We train students to go for start-ups as government jobs are limited.'
Gour Mohan Sachin Mandal Mahavidyalaya, located in a village outside Kolkata, has tied up with a firm that will train students in IT and get them certificates from Infosys Foundation. 'Finding internship opportunities for a large number of students was a problem, particularly in a rural college like ours. Only when online internship was approved by the affiliating university (University of Calcutta, in their case), we could find a way out. We signed an MoU with an organisation for providing 80 hours of internship in blended mode in IT that will earn them certificates from Infosys Foundation. Classes have begun for the course,' said an associate professor at the college.
Dr. Biswas of Sanskrit College and University added: 'The internship sounds like an exciting idea on paper, but only colleges and universities with a lot of money (essentially private ones) can implement it effectively. We haven't even begun. Because we aren't offering multiple exits, we still have a semester to get it right. We will place them with organisations that we know.'

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He added: 'It's not merely a hardware problem. It's the sovereignty of our digital future.' 'Sometimes I Want to Cry' There has long been a tech gap between rich and developing countries. Over the past decade, cheap smartphones, expanding internet coverage and flourishing app-based businesses led some experts to conclude that the divide was diminishing. Last year, 68 percent of the world's population used the internet, up from 33 percent in 2012, according to the International Telecommunication Union, a United Nations agency. With a computer and knowledge of coding, getting a company off the ground became cheaper and easier. That lifted tech industries across the world, be they mobile payments in Africa or ride hailing in Southeast Asia. But in April, the U.N. warned that the digital gap would widen without action on AI Just 100 companies, mostly in the United States and China, were behind 40 percent of global investment in the technology, the U.N. said. The biggest tech companies, it added, were 'gaining control over the technology's future.' The gap stems partly from a component everyone wants: a microchip known as a graphics processing unit, or GPU. The chips require multibillion-dollar factories to produce. Packed into data centers by the thousands and mostly made by Nvidia, GPUs provide the computing power for creating and delivering cutting-edge AI models. Obtaining these pieces of silicon is difficult. As demand has increased, prices for the chips have soared, and everyone wants to be at the front of the line for orders. Adding to the challenges, these chips then need to be corralled into giant data centers that guzzle up dizzying amounts of power and water. Many wealthy nations have access to the chips in data centers, but other countries are being left behind, according to interviews with more than two dozen tech executives and experts across 20 countries. 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In the United States, by contrast, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta and OpenAI have pledged to spend more than $300 billion this year, much of it on AI infrastructure. The expenditure approaches Canada's national budget. Harvard's Kempner Institute, which focuses on AI, has more computing power than all African-owned facilities on that continent combined, according to one survey of the world's largest supercomputers. Brad Smith, Microsoft's president, said many countries wanted more computing infrastructure as a form of sovereignty. But closing the gap will be difficult, particularly in Africa, where many places do not have reliable electricity, he said. Microsoft, which is building a data center in Kenya with a company in the United Arab Emirates, G42, chooses data center locations based largely on market need, electricity and skilled labor. 'The AI era runs the risk of leaving Africa even further behind,' Smith said. Jay Puri, Nvidia's executive vice president for global business, said the company was also working with various countries to build out their AI offerings. 'It is absolutely a challenge,' he said. Chris Lehane, OpenAI's vice president of global affairs, said the company had started a program to adapt its products for local needs and languages. A risk of the AI divide, he said, is that 'the benefits don't get broadly distributed, they don't get democratized.' Tencent, Alibaba, Huawei, Google, Amazon, Hetzner and OVHcloud declined to comment. The gap has led to brain drains. In Argentina, Dr. Wolovick, 51, the computer science professor, cannot offer much compute power. His top students regularly leave for the United States or Europe, where they can get access to GPUs, he said. 'Sometimes I want to cry, but I don't give up,' he said. 'I keep talking to people and saying: 'I need more GPUs. I need more GPUs.'' 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