Salient Features

The School focuses on livelihood promotion, and not rural development or micro-finance; working with people who lack access to good training due to their inadequate command over English language and not their basic intelligence; guided by practitioners working closely with academicians; involving a mix of class-room learning and learning on site; at different locations; with support from an extended faculty group (EFG); in collaboration with multiple institutions.

1. The School has been designed to be without a brick and mortar campus. On the strength of its faculty located at 18 different locations across the country, the School organizes its programs in locations closer and suitable to the practitioners.
2. The School endeavors to create practitioner-oriented knowledge base for livelihood promotion. Its knowledge building methodology aims to explicit the tacit knowledge of the practitioners and people and making it available in the form of instrumental knowledge for creating large number of livelihoods.
3. The School in order to make the livelihood education accessible to the practitioners, who do not have access to higher education due to their inadequate command over English language, offers all its educational and training programs in the vernacular medium. The School believes that this would address the issue of livelihoods of Bharat, the remote rural India excluded from deriving the benefits of economic and technological development of the country.
4. In the combination of academics and practice, putting practice first is the approach adopted by the School. The School engages in academic pursuit on issues that are important for practice. It attempts at bringing in the required academic rigor into knowledge relevant to and arising from practice.
5. The School has 92 faculty members, 13 of which are the members of the core faculty team. The other 79 members belong to the Extended Faculty Group (EFG), which is one of the most important features of the School. This is a group of empanelled reflective practitioners, academicians, or domain specialists, who work with the School closely for various functions. They contribute and participate in different programs depending upon the suitability of time and place.
6. Dissemination of education in short modules of around a week, which are easier for practitioners to come and attend, while they remain engaged with their work.
7. The School predominantly uses participatory methodology for teaching and educating practitioners. Learning is based on a mix of classroom sessions, field-based exercises and post program follow-up assignments.
8. With a need and intent to be financially self-reliant in reasonably short period and to reasonable extent  the School works on the revenue model. It proposes to meet the expenditure of its activities out of the fees charged for its services to the maximum possible extent.

The School places high emphasis on delivery of high quality. Towards this the School has set up a referral system in addition to an internal review system, for the quality assurance of all its knowledge building and knowledge management processes.