Two years after Indrajit Sengupta earned a B.A. in Economics from Calcutta University, he was still desperately searching for a job, like two million other residents of his city. In a country in which two out of five people are unemployed or underemployed, Indrajit realized that, without help, his prospects were bleak.

The young man became part of a unique program called the I Create/NFTE partnership. It uses a proven Western nonprofit model for educating entrepreneurs, seeking to develop job creators instead of job seekers. Offices are in Calcutta and Jaipur.

The I Create/NFTE program not only trains new entrepreneurs but also provides mentoring and support services. It makes trainers out of college professors and teachers like Dr. Mallinath Mukherjee, who became an I Create/NFTE master trainer.

I learned about I Create through my long-time association with Steve Mariotti, founder and president of the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship (www.nfte.com). He put me in touch with Vijay Kapoor, a retired colonel in the India army, who heads I Create's activities in India.

Kapoor is armed with an evangelical passion. He receives support from local business leaders who serve as mentors and help establish micro loan programs for budding entrepreneurs. It's the help of others that makes I Create succeed.

When Dr. Mukherjee heard about his former student Indrajit Sengupta's plight, he invited the young man to take the I Create/NFTE workshop. After going through the program, Indrajit started his own business in a computer-related field by zeroing in on two specific tasks: transcribing transcripts and documents onto a computer for publishing companies and government publications; and doing data entry.

I Create also found Indrajit a mentor, Dr. Gurdial Singh, a successful software businessman. He provided the guidance Indrajit needed to get his business up and running.

Indrajit didn't have enough money to buy a computer, so he rented one. Today, thanks to the I Create/NFTE program, Indrajit runs a successful business called At Your Service, with four employees and assignments from a major publishing company and an accounting company.

Creating a Culture of Entrepreneurship

The program began in 2000 when Harsh Bhargava, a successful New Jersey businessman, and his wife Aruna, a psychologist, decided they wanted to give something back to the country of their birth. They established I Create with a mission to substantially reduce unemployment and instill self-confidence and a sense of dignity in India's youth.

Their task is daunting. Each year, 20 million youth in India enter the job market with no jobs waiting for them. In West Bengal alone, five million people are unemployed. In the next decades, the country will have the largest number of working-age people in the world.

"The only way to stop India's huge unemployment rate from rising further is to create entrepreneurs who, in turn, create jobs and employ other people," says I Create's founder, Harsh Bhargava.

But a study by the London School of Business and Babson College on Indian attitudes about entrepreneurship and start-up fear of failure was not encouraging. In a country in which business is driven primarily by family and social institutions, risk-taking was not part of any accepted business model.

Realizing that they needed to reach young people early, I Create formed a partnership with the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE), a large US nonprofit which, since its inception in 1987, has taught 65,000 low income youth in America and seven other countries how to start and run their own businesses. (The NFTE has partnerships with Microsoft, the Goldman Sachs Foundation and the Stanford Business School and has been the subject of two Harvard Business School case studies on social entrepreneurship.)

"Research in the United states shows that young people who take entrepreneurship training are 65% more likely to start their own businesses," says president Mariotti.

Capitalizing on the strong correlation between the level of economic opportunity and economic growth, I Create interviewed successful NFTE entrepreneurs in the United States and Europe and included them in its workshop schedule.

When I visited I Create in Jaipur, I was impressed by how it has adapted NFTE's entrepreneurship training model to the unique challenges of India. The organization trains self-employed poor women and widows to create co-ops to better market themselves, and teaches them how to use the co-ops as leverage when negotiating with suppliers. I Create also works with middle class high school students to introduce them to the idea of starting a small business, hoping that they will go on to avoid unemployment lines by creating businesses and jobs.

Today, the I Create/NFTE program produces successful entrepreneurs who have started businesses ranging from manufacturing leather goods and selling refurbished textbooks to running a micro-credit program for 60 Indian women from two villages in West Bengal (see attached I Create/NFTE Success Stories).

The unique partnership, utilizing NFTE's hands-on interactive entrepreneurship curriculum, plans to train over one million people in India over the next five years. It won't be easy, as Kapoor knows all too well. But his passion and commitment is infectious. He's already sold me on mentoring students by email when I return to the states, and helping him promote supporters for I Create's microloan program that enables poor women entrepreneurs take their businesses to the next level.

"Many people tell me that because there are so many problems in India, what we're doing is only a drop in the bucket, that it really won't make a difference," says Kapoor. "I reply that it does make a difference to those individuals whom we have helped, and to their families, whose sons and daughters now have jobs because I Create/NFTE trained them to become entrepreneurs. It makes a difference to the widowed mother, whose only son used to hang out with criminals, but who now has his own small business and employs four people."