Atal Innovation Mission Launches Atal Tinkering Labs Sarthi

Atal Innovation Mission (AIM) – NITI Aayog launched ATL Sarthi, a comprehensive self-monitoring framework to strengthen the ever-growing ecosystem of Atal Tinkering Labs (ATL).

Atal Innovation Mission is establishing Atal Tinkering Laboratories (ATLs) in schools across India to foster curiosity, creativity, and imagination in young minds; and inculcate skills such as design thinking mindset, computational thinking, adaptive learning, physical computing etc. As of date, AIM has funded 10,000 schools to establish Atal Tinkering Labs (ATLs).

AIM is continuously strengthening this ecosystem by developing tools and framework to enhance the performance of ATLs and achieve the desired objectives. ATL Sarthi is one such initiative in this direction. As the name suggests, Sarthi is a charioteer and ATL Sarthi will enable the ATLs to be efficient and effective. The initiative has four pillars ensuring the performance enhancement of ATLs through regular process improvements like a self-reporting dashboard known as ‘MyATL Dashboard’ and Compliance SOPs for schools to ensure financial and non-financial compliances, on-ground enablement of ATLs in collaboration with relevant local authorities through Cluster-based Approach and providing ownership to schools to analyze their performance through Performance-Enablement (PE) Matrix.

The ATL Cluster aims at providing a self-sustainable model for enablement and monitoring wherein the ATLs and local authorities work in tandem with each other on-ground to form clusters of 20-30 ATLs in a particular region. These ATLs can learn from each other through training, collaborations, events and best practices. As a pilot, AIM executed ATL Sarthi with different partners in regions like Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat.

Mission Director Atal Innovation Mission (AIM) NITI Aayog Dr. Chintan Vaishnav said, “Atal Innovation Mission aims to foster millions of young innovators in India by setting up ATLs in schools. To further improve their performance, AIM has launched ATL Sarthi. It provides a Monitoring and Evaluation framework to enhance the performance of ATLs. We believe ATL Sarthi will add a very important element of self-sustainability to the ATLs which is the ultimate goal of AIM. We urge all Governments, private institutions, and innovation councils across India to be a part of it and help us in the implementation of the initiative.”

The launch event was also attended by Suresh Kumar, IAS, Andhra Pradesh, Commissioner of School Education; Smt. B B Cauvery, IAS, SPD, Samagra Sikhsha; Mr Sudhanva, MD and Founder – Excel Soft; Mr Yogesh Suri, Director – Vigyan Ashram; Mr Sheshagri K M Rao, Education Specialist, UNICEF; Mr Brijesh Srivastava, Programme Manager, MGNF- IIM Ahmedabad and Mr Hardik, MGNF who highlighted how they have adopted clustering approach in their respective regions to make the ATLs more efficient.