TULIP (The Urban Learning Internship Program) is a program for providing fresh graduates experiential learning opportunities in the urban sector. TULIP has been conceived pursuant to the Budget 2020-21 announcement by the Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman under the theme ‘Aspirational India’.

“The Government proposes to start a program whereby the urban local bodies across the country would provide internship opportunities to fresh engineers for a period up to one year.”

~Government proposal

Such a program will help reap the benefits of India’s demographic dividend as it is poised to have the largest working-age population in the world in the coming years. India has a substantial pool of technical graduates for whom exposure to real world project implementation and planning is essential for professional development. General education may not reflect the depth of productive knowledge present in society. Instead of approaching education as ‘doing by learning,’ our societies need to reimagine education as ‘learning by doing.’

Banefits

• TULIP would help enhance the value-to-market of India’s graduates and help create a potential talent pool in diverse fields like urban planning, transport engineering, environment, municipal finance etc. thus not only catalyzing creation of prospective city managers but also talented private/ non-government sector professionals.  
• TULIP would benefit ULBs and smart cities immensely. It will lead to an infusion of fresh ideas and energy with the engagement of youth in co-creation of solutions for solving India’s urban challenges.
• It will further the Government’s endeavours to boost community partnership and government- academia-industry-civil society linkages. 

Thus TULIP- “The Urban Learning Internship Program” would help fulfil twin goals of providing interns with the hands-on learning experience as well as infusing fresh energy and ideas in the functioning of India’s ULBs and Smart Cities.

This launch is also an important stepping stone for the fulfilment of MHRD and AICTE’s goal of 1 crore successful internships by the year 2025. 

AICTE Internship

The digital platform powering TULIP enables discovery, engagement, aggregation, amplification and transparency. The platform is customizable and provides immense flexibility to both ULBs/ Smart Cities and interns to enable convenient access. Security features have been thoroughly tested and the platform has been made scalable, federated and transparent by design.

MoHUA would reach out to State Governments to help boost internships in their cities. It will undertake capacity building initiatives in partnerships with State Governments to enable participation of ULBs and smart cities under TULIP.  As States & UTs have a deeper understanding of the regional challenges and opportunities at the urban level, they can effectively implement TULIP by matching their needs with skills developed through such internships.

                   State Governments/Union Territories are also urged to explore scaling up TULIP to parastatal agencies/ State Financial intermediaries and other organizations/ agencies related to urban development in their respective jurisdictions. Since the technology platform for TULIP is open, scalable and federated, such additions would be very easily possible.