FFI will provide an opportunity to young and enthusiastic college students to give back to society, and learn by working with highly experienced mentors on a real life project that directly affects the lives of their disadvantaged fellow beings. Fast Forward India will pilot in Indian School of Mines during 2006-07 and will expand to other colleges the next year once the results of our first pilot projects come in.

FastForward fellows will be selected every year to carry out a substantial project for a period of 8-9 months. The project can be in any area, but it must directly benefit some community (such as a literacy programme), provide a solid experience, and be meaningful to the individual. In general, the fellows will be able to work on a broad range of topics. FFI will also suggest some projects and students can decide to join one of these. Proposals must be specific with respect to the problem/issue it seeks to address. The proposals will be evaluated by an international committee, and the program will work closely with similar initiatives at MIT. Fellows will get an opportunity to carry out field work to conduct a community education program at their target location during summer/winter vacations. Funding will be provided to selected fellows to carry out the project.

FFI is piloting at the Indian School of Mines during 2006-07, which is the 3rd oldest and a top engineering college in India. After the results of the first pilot come in by the summer of 2007, we aim to launch it nationwide in India. The FFI team has shortlisted and announced three projects for the fast half of year 2007, Jagriti [ ...], Rakht Rekha [ ... ] and Ujjwal [ ...].

Projects' progress is and will be monitored over emails as well as on a group wiki for every team. Teams are strongly encouraged to collaborate using the group editing power of the wiki. During the winter vacation(Dec-Jan) of one month, FFI also organized a trip for teams to visit various NGOs in Gaya, Jamshedpur and Kolkata. The details of the trip will soon be posted on this site. Teams has submitted a report of their winter work with the NGO which will soon be available online.

Each person in the team provides a progress report to the team over email and also posts it to the wiki. We will carry out an evaluation of FFI projects in Fall 2007, and discuss further steps on expansion.