School of Programming, a collaborative initiative of Project Potential and NavGurukul in Kishanganj, is empowering young women from rural Bihar with software coding skills, opening doors to aspirational careers and transforming their future.
Less than one in 10 women in Bihar are part of the workforce, according to employment data, although virtually all are engaged in unpaid care work. Given the complexity of the challenge of getting rural women trained and employed in aspirational jobs, it often seems like an intractable problem.
However, two organisations have joined hands to showcase a successful solution. They skill young women and enable them to find meaningful employment in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) sector.
In May 2024, Project Potential – an organisation that helps youth realise their potential, and NavGurukul – a non-profit organisation that trains youth from low-income backgrounds for free in software programming, launched their collaborative School of Programming. It’s Bihar’s first free-of-cost software programming academy.
The residential programme, with a capacity of 100 students, enrols young women aged 17–29. They learn software programming languages, such as CSS, JavaScript and Python, along with life skills, thereby bridging the gender gap in the STEM sector and creating a cohort of local role models.
This initiative is a unique one in Bihar, where few such opportunities exist. If Bihar were a country, it would be the 12th largest, and yet, the 12th poorest. In India’s poorest state, the more educated the youth are, the more likely they are to be unemployed. Given these challenges, the School of Programming is a great opportunity to address poverty and gender inequity.
NavGurukul has had success in running software schools in other parts of India; to date, they have set up ten campuses across the country, with an over 1,000-student capacity in these campuses. Nearly 900 graduates have been successfully placed, with starting salaries for software engineers being 5–6 times higher than the average salary in Bihar.
The seed for the school was sown when Project Potential founder Zubin Sharma and NavGurukul co-founder Abhishek Gupta met in The Nudge Foundation’s inaugural incubation cohort in 2017.
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They decided to collaborate and Project Potential began supporting NavGurukul by mobilising young female students from Bihar to join NavGurukul’s campuses in Bengaluru and Pune. Over the subsequent few years, Project Potential was able to send 20 girls to NavGurukul’s campuses in Bengaluru and Pune.
However, a constant pain point was that the families of selected students did not allow the girls to join the programme because the Bangalore and Pune campuses were more than 1,000 kms from their homes. For every five students admitted to the program, only one joined.
When the Project Potential team spoke to the parents, they learned that the parents were willing to let their daughters work outside the state if they had a guaranteed, well-paying job. But they were reluctant to send the girls for training alone.
To address this challenge, the two organisations decided to set up a campus in Bihar, thereby bringing the programme to the prospective students’ doorstep. Given Project Potential’s track record in northeastern Bihar over the last decade, the organisations decided to set up the School of Programming in Kishanganj district, Bihar.
While NavGurukul operates its own campuses in other parts of India, they have found the most success working with community-based partner organisations, where the partners focus on mobilisation and running the campuses, and NavGurukul focuses on its core expertise of training and placements. For this reason, the two organisations decided to launch the inaugural School of Programming in Bihar.
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Their first student from Kishanganj, Annu Bharti, graduated in 2018 before joining Mindtree as a software engineer. She continues to work at Mindtree today as a senior software engineer. She has also been a JOSH Talks speaker. Just like Annu, the first group of 20 girls from Bihar, mobilised by Project Potential and who attended NavGurukul’s Software Programming courses at their Bangalore and Pune campuses, are now all well-placed, earning between Rs 3 lakh and Rs 8 lakh per annum.
Although launching the School of Programming was challenging, both organisations are focused on ensuring that all students from the first batch are trained and placed. After that, the hope is that future batches will follow in their footsteps, creating more female software engineers from rural Bihar. The success of these women would mean more than just jobs — it would bring the freedom to think beyond basic needs like food, clothing, and shelter (roti, kapda, makan), the freedom to travel where they wish, to enjoy leisure time with friends and to love and marry whomever they choose.
As the School of Programming continues to empower girls from rural Bihar with vital technical skills and opportunities, it not only ends generational poverty in individual households but also contributes to a larger change in social norms.
For example, in seeing the alumni who now have aspirational jobs, others in their villages have started investing more in educating their daughters. What the School of Programming ultimately showcases is that, while there are major challenges to creating a more inclusive and prosperous rural India, there are solutions as well that can be built and scaled.
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The lead image shows girls learning software coding at the School of Programming. (Photo by Sushila Murmu)
Tonmoy Talukdar is a development professional from Assam. His journey with Project Potential began in 2020, as an American India Foundation’s William J. Clinton Fellow for Service in India, and he has since remained with the organisation, taking on various roles and responsibilities.
