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

Colleges in West Bengal struggle to meet NEP's mandatory internship requirement, facing practical challenges and resource limitations.

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.

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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.”