Bangalore:
In her early 30s, Nagashree has taken a little over two months off to go back to school. So at 10 am on a weekday, dressed in an salwar kameez, she is walking down the corridor of Bangalore's prestigious Indian Institute of Management or IIM for a lecture on personal effectiveness.
There are 25 women who, like her, have enrolled for a course titled India Women in Leadership. It's the X,Y,Z for women who know the ABCs of politics.
Nagashree is a zilla panchayat member from a district in south Karnataka. She hopes the course will provide a booster shot to her political career. "How women can be empowered - how they can learn things - like winning strategies of the elections and personal skills like communication skills, body language, strategic thinking and how to be a leader - and what are the qualities of the leader," she says.
20 of the 26 women in this course have contested at least one election. The balance say that while they've so far circled politics, the course may persuade them to make a run for it. "My political ambition is to be in state politics, serve as an MLA in my place - and I want to be a minister in future." Lubna Sarwath works with an NGO in Hyderabad dedicated to those who have dropped out of school. "Today I do not see politics, or the political system, as a distant thing from me...now, going home interacting with the corporators, the MPs the MLAs - I don't see that as very far from me," she explains.
Nine weeks into their course, the women have been addressed by national-level leaders like the BJP's Sushma Swaraj and Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit. Field trips have included a visit to Parliament and another to Singapore. At 4.75 lakhs for the course, the learning curve is expensive. Most of the women have received some sort of financial assistance. IIM says it has also slashed its own costs. "By IIM standards, this is a deeply discounted programme. We earn a lot more doing executive education for the corporations. But we also raised a lot of scholarships - UN women, UNDP, the government of Karnataka has underwritten the cost of four participants - and (industrialist) Kiran Mazumdar Shaw stepped forward and helped out as well," said Professor Rajeev Gowda.