What if a university assignment didn’t just teach you but actually transformed you? What if learning meant going beyond the classroom into living stories—between cities and villages, memory and myth, tradition and culture? What if it could carry you from tracing the sacred waters of a Narmada ghat to documenting disappearing dialects in Jharkhand, into fishermen’s kitchens in Raigad, or inside a
craftsman’s quiet workshop in Maheshwar? At FLAME University, the Discover India Program (DIP) offers a deep dive into the soul of the country. Here, every journey becomes a chapter in a growing digital archive—one that documents India not just through facts and figures, but as lived, felt, and remembered by its people. Here, you don’t just study India. You walk it and hear it— and along the way, stitch together a cultural atlas of voices, histories, and traditions.In an age of surface-level scrolling and vanishing reels, the students of FLAME University are building something quietly radical—a living, breathing, digital tapestry of India. And it’s open to all curious travelers, armchair historians, academics, educators, even policy thinkers, and anyone seeking the India that doesn’t always make it to guidebooks or glossy textbooks. Since inception, DIP has evolved into one of India's most authentic experiential learning journeys. It invites second-year undergraduate students to leave the classroom behind and step into real communities, real traditions, and real tensions. Through the 10-day field immersions backed by months of interdisciplinary research, students become storytellers, documentarians, and cultural archivists.
Speaking on the significance of DIP at FLAME, Prof. Dishan Kamdar, Vice Chancellor, FLAME University, said, “The Discover India Program (DIP) is a one-of-a-kind experiential learning opportunity for our students with a rich legacy of more than 300 diverse and engaging projects curated by over 3,000 students, guided by faculty mentors. The DIP gives our students first-hand experience and a close understanding of the socio-economic, cultural, linguistic, and regional diversity of our country and greatly enhances the students’ real-world understanding. The experience helps students to conduct research with humility, interview with empathy, and record with responsibility. It prepares them not just for academic rigor but for a lifetime of civic thinking. In discovering India, they often discover themselves.”
He further added, “The DIP archives are well-designed, vibrant with rich, meaningful content. Visitors can browse by state, theme, or community. From exploring the intersection of music and migration in Rajasthan to how women in Tamil Nadu sustain local economies… DIP has it all, mapped with photos, videos, and on-the-ground stories.”
With over 300 projects, DIP serves as a virtual map of India, built through the eyes and voices of its youth. Not mere academic works, these are raw, real, and first-person narratives of transformation and resilience. These stories emerge from categories as vast as India itself. These include faith, food, urban change, tribal folklore, music, memory, and myth. Housed on the FLAME DIP portal, not as cold research but as warm repositories of lived experience, they are available for everyone to explore.
Prof. Poonam Gandhi, Assistant Dean, Experiential Programs at FLAME, shared, “The latest projects of DIP that speak to my soul include ‘Jal Jangal Zameen’ (a student journey into Mumbai’s Aarey forest, mapping the ecological and emotional landscape of a contested green lung), ‘Ab Hamara Daur Hai, Yeh Naya Indore Hai’ (tracking how Indore’s waste workers are becoming digital citizens in a smart city revolution), ‘Ahilya Bai ki Kahani, Maheshwar ki Zubaani’ (a tribute to oral memory and legacy, through the lens of Maheshwar’s residents), An Exploration of Elephant Rehabilitation in Kottoor, Kerala and Maati Jo Mel, Kutch Ji Kala (a legacy of tradition and resilience in pottery, Kutch, Gujarat), among others.”
As the NEP 2020 emphasizes anchoring in Indian knowledge systems, FLAME University’s Discover India Program is already several steps ahead, quietly laying down the tracks of a pedagogy built on encounter and not just instruction.
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