Public Policy Programs for School Students in India

Most subjects a school student studies are closed to them. A sixteen-year-old can learn chemistry but cannot publish in it. They can study history but cannot revise it. Public policy is one of the few fields where a school student can produce something that a person in the field would actually read.

That is a strange fact about the field and it is worth understanding, because it changes what a policy program can be for.

Why policy is open in a way other subjects are not

Indian policymaking runs a great deal of public consultation. Draft bills, regulations and frameworks are routinely put out for comment, and the comment window is genuinely open - not to accredited experts, but to anyone. A student who reads a draft carefully and writes a considered response is participating in the same process a think tank participates in.

The barrier is not permission. It is knowing that the door exists, and knowing how to write something worth reading once you are through it. That is roughly what a good policy program teaches.

What these programs actually teach

Less than you might expect about politics, and more about a particular way of thinking. The first thing most students have to unlearn is that policy means holding strong views. A policy is a specific intervention with a cost, a target, a delivery mechanism, and a set of people it will fail. Getting a student from the first idea to the second is most of the work.

• Reading a government document without being intimidated by it - the single most transferable skill on offer.

• Separating evidence from assertion, in others' writing and then in your own.

• Costing an idea. Who pays, how much, and what gets cut to fund it.

• Structuring an argument as a document rather than a speech.

What is available in India

The field is small. A handful of organisations run policy and civic-engagement programs for school students, some through workshops and campaigns, others through structured bootcamps. Our own Model NITI Aayog is four days across sixteen hours, online, for Grades 9 to 12 and undergraduates, working through infrastructure, environment, the economy, governance, foreign policy and welfare.

A session-by-session account of what those four days involve is in what actually happens at a Model NITI Aayog bootcamp.

The output is the point

A policy program that ends with a discussion has taught something. A policy program that ends with a document has proved it. Our participants write a white paper within a month of finishing, and papers that meet the standard are published under the student's own name and institution. Past subjects include private credit markets, disaster response infrastructure, urban freight logistics and deepfake regulation.

Those are the students' arguments rather than ours, and a fair number of them disagree with positions we hold. That is the correct outcome.

Who it suits

Students considering law, economics, public administration, journalism or the civil services eventually - but also, and more often, students who simply want to understand why the country works the way it does. It suits a writer more than a debater. If your child argues well out loud but resists putting it on paper, a simulation format may land better first.

The field is unusually open to young people. Very few of them know it. That gap is the whole opportunity.

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Cohort dates are on Upcoming Programs. For a longer commitment, Learnacy runs across a year.