MAKING A DIFFERENCE

AT THE TATA INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL SCIENCES IN MUMBAI, IMPROVING LIVES AND SOCIETY IS A COLLECTIVE GOAL. ITS WIDELY RENOWNED SCHOOL OF SOCIAL WORK IS OF A PIECE WITH THAT VISION

- SUHANI SINGH

At Mumbai's Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), “making a difference” is not a statement that’s made flippantly— it is something that’s etched in the ethos of every student that makes the cut at the esteemed institute. It’s their dream. And at TISS, they learn to make it a reality.

It’s this sentiment that brought Rounak Gaikwad, 25, formerly a student of hotel management, to TISS. Gaikwad was running a cloud kitchen in Nagpur when he felt a strong desire to “give back to society”. And what better place than TISS, which has topped india today’s best colleges survey for the last decade, to pursue it. A student of the School of Social Work’s [SoSW] Dalit and Tribal Studies and Action programme, Gaikwad recently got an opportunity to make a tiny impact when as part of his field-work at Tarun Sadan, an NGO working for underprivileged youth, he got an 18-year-old enrolled at the Indira Gandhi National Open University so that the person could study and work simultaneously.

After almost two long years of Covid-19-induced disruption, TISS returned to normalcy in 2022, its first full year of offline teaching since the pandemic. For Bipin Jojo, the dean of SoSW, it wasn’t easy to get the institute up and running to handle the arrival of over 400 students, including 19 from Myanmar, for its highly sought-after Master’s programme. The return of faculty members to the campus had to be smooth; desktop computers, which remained shut for two years had to be replaced, and extra-curricular activities that had come to a standstill had to be revived. And that included the annual public lecture series and the festival, Sameeksha.