Union Budget Students Workshop 2020-21
Services Category: Training / Coaching
Here are our ideas, dear Finance Minister!
Organizing a Union Budget ideation workshop was a dream come true for me. The first such event, a 2.5 hour session, was held on January 18, 2020. School students from various schools in Rajapalayam presented their ideas for Union Budget 2020-21. We could submit the wish list to the Ministry of Finance through the MyGov.in portal.
Students Wish List
Students formed 5 groups of 4-5 members. Each group focused on creating ideas on one of the five domains: education, healthcare, environment, industry & jobs, and infrastructure development. They were given the triggers for their ideation in the form of the following three categories:
- Products: Whose prices should go up, and whose prices should come down
- People: Whose contributions are important (for the particular domain) and what can be done for their welfare, and
- Programs: What are the big problems and what can be done to solve them.
(Open the document on the left.)
Group discussion begins...
Discussion is on...
Snacks break
Herbal tea break
Presentation on what a budget is and what its objectives is very important for the students to first understand the purpose of the ideation event. I made the following presentation for them. It was certainly a great learning experience for me - only in the process of preparing the presentation I understood several economic concepts.
Communicating budget terms in the language of children is very important - for instance, they can understand income but revenue could be a difficult word.
Also I created Vadivelu (the most popular Tamil comedy actor of all time) memes for explaining ideas.
The Invitation
The only publicity I could do is to prepare this invitation using Canva.com and did a Whatsapp broadcast. We could get about 25 school students (from class 4 to 9) took part in the event.