City student bags global fellowship

By The Desk | November 12, 2009 | People | 1 comment

Indian Express: Ketan Deshpande, a third year student of engineering at a city college, has become the youngest in India to bag the Paragon Fellowship awarded by the Hong Kong-based Foundation for Youth Social Entrepreneurship (FYSE) this year. Ketan got the award for starting a voluntary organisation – Friends’ Union for Energising Lives (FUEL).

FUEL works towards creating awareness of entrance tests and centralised admission procedures to colleges for students of X and XII standard. The organisation, started three years ago, also runs a helpline and conducts workshops giving details of the exam dates, tips on filling forms, preparing for the tests and so on.

The Paragon Fellowship allots mentors -successful entrepreneurs who have made it big from scratch -to the fellowship awardees. These mentors not only open up funding opportunities, but also help students submit a business plan to be presented in the Asia-level conference of entrepreneurs to be held in June 2010 at Hyderabad. “I look at it as an opportunity to expand FUEL and ensure that a larger base of students would benefit by the activity,” Ketan said. He also said that the recognition would help him participate in similar international competitions. A total of 570 entries were received for the fellowship from the Asia pacific region, of which 100 were selected -47 of those from India.

“Many youngsters in Asia Pacific dream of being an entrepreneur, but they hesitate to take action because they don’t know any young entrepreneurs who have already succeeded in doing so. The Paragon fellowship aims to change that,” said Andrea Krause, Executive Director, FYSE.

Ketan, who hails from Bhusawal, is in the third year of his computer engineering at Vishwakarma Institute of Technology. He founded FUEL in 2006 when he was in first year of the course. “I has just passed HSC that time and wanted to pursue engineering. I faced a lot of difficulties to get an entry into the engineering course because of lack of awareness about exact admission procedures,” said Ketan. He added that by the time he managed to collect information, the dates of one entrance test had already passed.He managed to clear another entrance test and thus get admission into VIT.

Agitated by the lack of information and the struggle, “I started FUEL so that no student misses educational opportunities for lack of information,” Ketan, whose father Laxmikant is a medical officer and mother Sulabha is a judge at Thane, said. Today, he has up-to-date data of all entrance tests, which was published in the form of a booklet called Students Fuel in 2006.

Realising that books are not enough to spread this information, Ketan had launched a telephone helpline and started a web portal www.studentsfuel.com with a core team of six and a volunteer force of 116. He also travels across the state on weekends to institutes, coaching classes, colleges to conduct free seminars, supported by voluntary donations.

This year FUEL has reached out to almost 60,000 students. Impressed by the effort, Gururaj Deshpande’s Deshpande Foundation has also invited him to do the same in five districts of Karnataka, where he has now reached out to 5,000 students.

FUEL is all set to launch SMS alerts and computer software that will help students to shortlist colleges based on their current score and previous year cut-offs.

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