Aah….this is something on which I have loads to tell me n ya… my Summer Internship Project, or SIP as it is referred to here. Like most fachchas, I was wondering where I’d land up for my SIP. For no less reason than that all-holy word called PPO ;). Naturally, was making efforts to land a decent project, irrespective of the organization. Had an opportunity to do it at a few places, but one thing led to another, and I finally decided on a quasi-Governmental consultancy to spend the next 16weeks (yes, rub ur eyes, its 16!!) of my internship.

The project revolved around a cluster formation for small scale industries in the precision engineering segment in hyderabad. And boy, what an eye-opener has the project been to me, in ways more than one. Sure,I’ve learnt a lotta things, after all those swot, supply chain analyses, all those cluster mapping sessions, all those days under the sun talkin to entrepreneurs in India’s crucial manufacturing sector (remember, b-school lingo ;) ). But more than all these, a few things that I observed about how the Government doles out funds for such consultancies or for many of those sector-specific institutes can really make one shudder!! For one, it would be a huge under-statement if I say that the project proposals that I’d observed were pathetic. Prime importance is attached to the presentation rather than content. And being from a digital age where most of us grew up believing “content is king”, that was something that was really hard for me to digest. And no, those proposals weren’t the junk kind. Those were those which actually landed projects worth crores of rupees for the organizations concerned. Sample this- a “comprehensive” SWOT analysis that an organization did after appointing an expert panel is an ad verbatim lift from Kotler!!! And we were expected to work on similar lines!!! What i did?? your guess is as good as mine :p anyways, we( it was a team of 6) had a real ball of a time during the project an quite a learning experience towards the end :) Hopefully I learn a thing or two out of these past 16weeks….. :)