FLAME Students Map India Through Field Projects
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Pune, July 10, 2025: In a world increasingly ruled by digital content and brief attention spans, FLAME University in Pune is giving its students a radical substitute for conventional education. The university is transforming the way India is researched, experienced, and remembered via its distinctive experiential learning program known as the Discover India Program. The initiative urges students to depart the classroom and experience India’s rich social, cultural, and historical environment. Every student trip adds to a growing digital archive that records India via lived experiences, emotions, and stories of its people as well as through statistics and facts. Unlike conventional academic projects, DIP fosters an engaging, real-world approach. Second-year undergraduate students spend months in interdisciplinary study in preparation before starting 10-day field immersions. These journeys carry them to numerous places, including the sacred ghats of Narmada, the tribal regions of Jharkhand, the fishing kitchens of Raigad, and the artisan workshops of Maheshwar. As a result, students develop into anthropologists, documentarians, and cultural archivists. From the bottom up, their work builds a digital tapestry that captures the subtleties and variety of Indian life. At a time when much of what we eat is created for speed and convenience, the FLAME students are cultivating a more deliberate, meaningful, and sluggish style of engaging with the rich legacy of the country. Prof. Dishan Kamdar, Vice Chancellor of FLAME University, pointed out the value of DIP beyond its academic use: “The Discover India Program is a distinctive experiential learning experience with a history of over 300 diverse and intriguing initiatives created by over 3,000 students and supervised by our academics. Students have first-hand exposure to the socio-economic, cultural, linguistic, and regional diversity of India. The program helps them research with humility, interview with empathy, and report with responsibility. They often find themselves as they learn about India, he remarked. He also drew attention to the depth and accessibility of the DIP digital archive. Users can explore initiatives by state, community, or theme using the well-organized material of the website. From investigating the intersection of music and migration in Rajasthan to documenting how Tamil Nadu women sustain regional economies, the archive abounds in stories highlighting communities often ignored in mainstream narratives. Not only a scholarly repository, the archive is a live, breathing map of India’s unpublished stories. Every one of the more than 300 student projects narrates a distinct tale rooted in unfiltered, actual lived experience. Among the categories are native tongues, ecological and environmental issues, regional music, folklore, local foods, faith and belief systems, and many others. These tales, which can be found via the FLAME DIP portal, are supported by pictures, videos, interviews, and documentary-style stories. Not only for academic reasons, these are aimed for anyone seeking to expand knowledge of the country. According to Prof. Poonam Gandhi, Assistant Dean of Experiential Programs at FLAME, some of the most recent DIP initiatives that really speak to me show the wide reach of the program. These include “Jal Jangal Zameen,” which examines Mumbai’s Aarey forest and the emotional link people have with this divisive green area; “Ab Hamara Daur Hai, Yeh Naya Indore,” which follows garbage workers as they go into the digital age in smart city; and “Ahilya Bai ki Kahani, Maheshwar ki Zubaani,” a beautiful oral history homage to the queen through Maheshwar’s inhabitants’ voices. Other interesting works include a study of elephant rehabilitation programs in Kottoor, Kerala, Maati Jo Mel, Kutch Ji Kala, which chronicles the tenacity and beauty of Kutch’s pottery traditions. By combining scholarly study with practical fieldwork and cultural immersion, DIP creates a pedagogy based on experience and involvement rather than rote learning, already far ahead of India’s implementation of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020’s goals prioritizing grounding education in Indian knowledge systems. This encourages socially conscious people and culturally aware thinkers. Besides learning about India, the pupils at FLAME University are assisting to build a growing national archive—one based on voices, memories, and lived experiences from across the country—through their travels.
