A three-year IEEE initiative has demonstrated a replicable model for keeping rural Indian girls in school and on paths toward STEM careers, using a combination of hands-on learning, female role models, and sustained parent engagement.
The Women in Science, Engineering (WiSE) project was launched by IEEE Fellow Rajiv Joshi and IEEE Senior Member Rajesh Zele with an $80,000 grant from the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society in 2022. It ran from 2023 to 2025, hosting five-day residential programs on the IIT Bombay campus for 160 to 200 girls each year. Participants came from rural and tribal areas in Maharashtra and Karnataka, two Indian states where girls face sharp dropout spikes between ages 11 and 14 due to early marriage pressures, traditional gender roles, and familial expectations for financial support.
Program Design
The curriculum was built around Break-Make-Program (BMP) experiences: girls worked in small teams to disassemble gadgets, rebuild them, and create new designs. Sessions included working with microscopes, learning about renewable energy, and building remote-controlled vehicles. A capstone drone project combined mechanical and electronics skills practiced throughout the week.
Build kits were created by IIT Bombay students and sent home with participants and their teachers, extending learning beyond the camp. One graduate, Sushi Pawar, built a drone during WiSE and later demonstrated it to a national audience at the Pariksha Pe Charcha event hosted by the Prime Minister.
Daily presentations from "Winspirers," successful Indian women in STEM and beyond, provided relatable models. The first speaker was Sindhutai Dakle, a Maharashtra farmer who dropped out after 10th grade, got married, and built a coalition of 400 female farmers using WhatsApp and Facebook to share market pricing and growing techniques. Zele described her as the ideal Winspirer: proof that circumstances do not define possibilities.
Parent Accountability
A distinctive element was parent engagement. Adults were required to participate in quarterly online meetings with teachers, mentors, and volunteers for at least four years after their daughter's camp attendance. This created accountability for supporting continued school enrollment.
Results and Expansion
No empirical outcome data has been published, but participant feedback suggests impact. Tejswini Manoj Patil said the program shifted her interest from "passive curiosity to active confidence." Pallavi Bharti, who initially wanted to be a doctor and believed engineering was "stressful and boring," changed her goal to engineering after experiencing the IIT Bombay environment.
The initiative ended in 2025, but its framework is being adopted elsewhere. IEEE CASS chapters in Bangalore and Kerala are adapting the model, and Joshi says he has received requests for information from Asia, Africa, and Europe.
The broader context is stark. Women made up roughly 28% of the STEM workforce in 2024, according to the World Economic Forum, and the proportion of female STEM graduates has remained near 35% for over a decade. In rural India, the barriers are compounded by social and economic pressures that push girls out of school before they ever reach university.
WiSE's approach, talent is universal but opportunity is not, targets that specific gap with a model that combines immediate hands-on engagement with long-term community support.