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Lt. Gen. (Retd) Arjun Ray, PVSM and VSM — a much decorated and admired leader of the Indian Army — culminated his long career (1963-2002) in the defence services by conceptualising Operation Sadbhavana which pioneered army-people contact through the use of civilian volunteers in Ladakh. In 2002, he took premature retirement from the Indian Army to roll out the state-of-the-art IBO, Geneva- affiliated Indus International School (IIS), Bangalore which within the short span of eight years is routinely ranked among the country’s top three international schools in the annual EducationWorld-C fore India’s Most Respected Schools Survey.
Newspeg. In early July, the Indus Trust soft-launched its Indus School of Leadership (ISL) sited on an eco-friendly 10-acre campus (superbly landscaped by awards-winning Bangalore-based architect Dinesh Verma) in Yellagiri, Tamil Nadu — a salubrious hill station midway between Bangalore and Chennai. With effect from the start of the current academic year, all 1,800 students and 215 teachers of the three Indus International schools (Bangalore, Pune and Hyderabad) will be obliged to undergo six days of leadership training every year at ISL, residing in tented accommodation and receiving leadership training lectures and experi-ential education by way of hiking, trekking, war games and negotiating the country’s first Discovery Course super-structure designed by Belgian educator Georges Herbet in 1919 and erected on the ISL campus at a cost of Rs.1 crore. During school holidays, the ISL campus and facilities will be made available to corporate and other organisations for leadership and team-building training.
History. Since shedding his military fatigues for civvy suiting in 2002, Ray has not only developed IIS, Bangalore into one of the most highly respected new genre international schools, but has also promoted IIS, Hyderabad (estb.2008) and IIS Pune (2009) modelled after IIS Bangalore, offering the full K-12 curriculum of IBO, Geneva. Moreover in related diversifications, the Indus Trust has promoted the free-of-charge Indus International Community School (estb.2010) for poor neighbourhood children on its Bangalore campus; the Indus Training and Research Institute (2009) for teacher training and curriculum research, and the Indus Pre-learning Centre (2011) for early childhood education. Last month (July) the trust inaugurated its Indus Leadership School at Yellagiri.
Direct speech. “Every individual has leadership potential in various intellig-ences and varying degrees. We believe it is our responsibility to discover the latent potential and talent of our students. I believe that leadership can be taught as a subject in its own right, like engineering or medicine. However it cannot entirely be taught in class-rooms. Its emotional, aesthetic and spiritual components need to be nurtured in an experiential environment. For this outdoor leadership laboratory conceptualised for ILS, we have designed a unique curriculum which will offer all IIS students leadership education including goals-setting, communi-cation, teamwork, community outreach and pay-it-forward concepts. There’s a severe shortage of leadership in contemporary India and ISL is a first step in formally addressing this lacuna,” says Ray.
Future plans. With leadership develop-ment being a vital priority for India Inc as well, the Indus Trust management has agreed to rent its ISL campus to corporates for their training and development programmes. “This will not only provide companies a healthy, outdoor environment for experiential learning, but also help us to recover our capital investment and generate revenue for maintenance and upgradation of this unique facility,” says Ray.
Dilip Thakore (Bangalore)