India, Nov. 20 -- A quiet transformation is taking root in Punjab's classrooms. For years, we told our children to study hard and get a job. Today, we are preparing them to create jobs. The change is driven by necessity and vision. Over the past few years, the shift in aspiration became too significant to ignore. Government vacancies shrank, private jobs often proved unstable or underpaid, and thousands of graduates emerged every year - qualified, yet unemployable. Meanwhile, industries evolved faster than our classrooms, widening the gap between learning and livelihoods. Sensing this disconnect, and the entrepreneurial spark in Punjab's youth, the government began to recalibrate its role from merely providing employment to enabling employment creators. A new generation of policies and programmes took shape, designed to cultivate innovation and enterprise. Punjab's renewed push for entrepreneurship took concrete shape with the Industrial and Business Development Policy (IBDP), 2022, which placed innovation, startups and skills at the centre of the state's growth strategy. Moving beyond traditional industrial incentives, the policy recognised entrepreneurship as a key driver of economic diversification, MSME competitiveness and youth employment. It introduced targeted measures to strengthen the startup ecosystem, from financial incentives and incubation support to easier regulatory facilitation. What began as an industrial strategy soon translated into practice and evolved into a human resource development initiative. Building on this momentum, Punjab in 2022 took a decisive step from policy to practice with the launch of the Business Blasters programme in government schools, where Class 11 students received seed capital, mentorship and a platform to pitch real business ideas, turning entrepreneurship into lived experience. The modest pilot has now grown into a statewide movement. Teenagers are setting up micro-enterprises, and many anxiously hold on to their first Rs.500 of profit, not for its monetary value, but because it proves their idea works. More importantly, they are learning what no textbook can teach how to price a product, share responsibilities, handle failure, negotiate with customers and uphold ethics even while making profit. Under the Business Blasters programme, young innovators walked in with ideas, not resumes. Supporting them with seed funding helped turn their concepts into real ventures. Students such as Jahnvi (herbal soap), Sukhman Singh (safety stick), Gagandeep Kaur (handmade chocolates), Narinder Kumar and Arjun Chaudhary (electric cycle) and Pallavi (herbal chaat masala) are living proof that when we trust our children with responsibility, they respond with creativity and courage. Building on this, the state adopted entrepreneurship as a subject in Class 11 from the 2025-26 academic session. The entrepreneurship mindset course (EMC), rolled out on October 9, 2025, is the first of its kind in India. It ensures students learn business by doing business. The course will be mandatory across universities, ITIs and polytechnics, where every student is required to run a real venture with defined revenue targets each semester instead of only studying theory. Delivered through an AI-enabled platform in Punjabi, Hindi and English, EMC equips students with tools, mentorship and real-time business monitoring. The scale of adoption is already visible - over 27,000 students have registered and begun their entrepreneurial journey, and nearly 9,500 have completed their first task under the pilot, even before its formal launch. With a target to cover 1.5 lakh students in 2025-26 and expand to five lakh learners by 2028-29, Punjab is turning its education system into a pipeline of job creators rather than job seekers. If even a fraction of our 2.6 lakh senior-secondary students launch viable micro-ventures, it will be a game-changer, leading to a generation that sees risk as a ladder, not a trapdoor. Parallelly, vocational education is being realigned with the National Education Policy, 2020. Under the pre-vocational education at middle stage initiative, students in Classes 9 and 10 can choose from elective modules on digital entrepreneurship, accounting, retail operations, welding, carpentry, electronics, beauty and wellness, logistics and agro-processing. These are hands-on, project-based and linked to flexible certification after Class 10 with the aim to reduce fear of failure, enhance employability and make entrepreneurship an accessible option. These steps signal a comprehensive shift from policy to pedagogy, from the aspiration of a pay cheque to the spirit of possibility, nurturing a generation that thinks like entrepreneurs, not applicants. While mindset is the first step, it must be followed by a supportive ecosystem and Punjab is steadily strengthening its entrepreneurship scaffolding. Innovation Mission Punjab (IMPunjab) serves as the state's innovation accelerator, linking students and early-stage founders with mentors, incubators, investors and alumni networks. It has helped establish entrepreneurship cells across campuses like Sun Foundation's Incubation Centre at Multi Skill Development Centre by the name of Start Up Studio and runs programmes that support ideas from concept to prototype and eventually to market-ready enterprises. Complementing this, the Startup Punjab initiative and Startup Policy provide the financial backbone, offering seed grants, interest subsidies, and funding support for incubators in the government sector up to Rs.1 crore and for private institutions up to Rs.50 lakh. Together, they de-risk entrepreneurship and give young ventures a real chance to survive and thrive. This is exactly the bridge the youth of Punjab need between classroom theory and market reality. Punjab's model is powerful because it begins with mindset before money, treating entrepreneurship as a mainstream skill. Seed grants and real-world stakes give students ownership, accountability and the kind of confidence no textbook can teach. Crucially, this journey doesn't end at school, through EMC, campus E-Cells, incubators and accelerators, ideas are carried forward into viable ventures. While these student enterprises may be small, they buy local, sell local and profit local, quietly fuelling neighbourhood economies. To sustain this momentum, Punjab must convert inspiration into infrastructure. Of course, the journey is not without challenges, funding continuity, teacher training and rural participation, but none of these are insurmountable if we stay committed. That commitment must reflect in actions: Linking school ventures to college credits, increasing milestone-based seed funding, turning vocational labs into maker spaces, strengthening campus incubators with local investor access and publishing an annual youth enterprise so that measured efforts become multiplied outcomes. Punjab has always been entrepreneurial, whether in its fields, industries or across foreign shores, and that spirit lives in our youth. With Business Blasters in schools, entrepreneurship in the curriculum, vocational pathways, the EMC in higher education and a growing startup ecosystem, the state is finally aligning education with enterprise. We must stay the course: Scale what works, improve what doesn't and ensure that every youth who dreams of building something new finds the mentor, the skill and the first rupee to begin. What we are nurturing is not just a startup culture but self-respect, resilience and shared prosperity....