Karta Initiative

The Karta initiative is a social mobility mission to transform the futures of bright low-income students from developing and emerging economies. The Tata Trusts have partnered with the Karta initiative to improve access to world-class educational and employment opportunities for talented youngsters from low-income backgrounds. It seeds the motivation for impoverished and under-resourced student communities, equipping young people with skills, knowledge and exposure to transform their lives.

The Karta Initiative straddles education and livelihood interventions by creating a new talent pipeline that is both meritorious and deserving. This partnership builds on the Trusts’ ongoing educational interventions and complements the JN Tata Endowment postgraduate scholarship programme. The initiative also builds and leverages collaborations with premier universities, and creates a multiple-stakeholder scholarship fund.

Key objectives

The Karta Initiative seeks to:

• Emerge as a selective access programme to create path-breakers.
• Create an e-access platform where resources and content can be aggregated, curated and brought together through an open source platform.
• Roll out a hybrid of social technology and human interaction, creating a platform that has impact of scale.
• Grow into a magnet and sustainable movement, creating scholarship funding for world-class university opportunities.

A rigorous screening process identifies students who display academic excellence and are aligned with the initiative’s core values of service, integrity, flexibility of thought and action and perseverance. The initiative’s long-term objective is for the movement to be sustained, expanded and eventually led by the students.

The Karta Initiative has garnered international support from renowned universities all over the world, as well as from philanthropists and charitable organisations, global firms, eminent academics and others. The impact initiative goes beyond the students with whom it directly engages. Communities are being transformed through a ripple effect, with older scholars inspiring and supporting subsequent batches, thereby setting it on the path to sustainability.