The Ministry Of External Affairs has launched a new program called SAMEEP, which aims to take the Indian foreign policy and its global engagement to Indian students across the country. The ministry has asked all of its officers who are on leave to travel back to their hometowns, asking them particularly to visit their alma maters. The job of these officers will be to talk to the students that are currently in said alma maters and engage them in the jobs that the ministry is engaged in. This would give the students a fair idea on how India engages with the world, about the foreign policies and how diplomacy is actually conducted.
SAMEEP is voluntary for the officers but it gives them a chance to visit their alma maters and their hometowns. The ministry would be providing the officers with a standardized presentation but apart from that, the officers would be free to improvise and talk about their personal experiences. The main goal of SAMEEP is to get students to understand and take an interest in India’s place on a global scale. However, it will also work as a tool that will increase the interests of the students to take diplomacy as a career option. A similar program has had IAS officers also going back to the place of their first posting to assess its development and make recommendations.
The MEA program even crowd-sourced its name from the My Gov portal, out of 550 entries. ‘SAMEEP – Students and MEA Engagement Program’ is very much like the long acronyms which PM Modi uses to name various government programs. The objective “is to familiarize school and college students in India about the functioning of the MEA, as well as introducing them to the key elements of India’s foreign policy and its success stories. We want to engage with the youth at the grass root level,” said MEA spokesperson Raveesh Kumar.
