The Chevening Gurukul Fellowship for Leadership and Excellence is the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s flagship fellowship for India and has run for more than 20 years. The fellowship is aimed at young high-flyers and mid-career professionals from diverse backgrounds with a strong and demonstrable leadership potential. The fellowship addresses issues faced by leaders in all fields and explores changing ideas and practices of leadership, looking at the implications of globalisation for Indian leaders.

Every year twelve selected Gurukul Fellows will be offered an intensive, twelve-week residential course at the Department of Politics and International Relations (DPIR) at the University of Oxford to study and address these challenges through three fundamental and interlocking components focussing on academic understanding, policy relevance and personal development.

This innovative programme will familiarise India’s future leaders with an understanding of the contemporary opportunities and challenges of global integration, the leadership skills to play a leading role in meeting them, and the knowledge to translate this into policy and practice.

Gurukul Fellows will be exposed to current issues and themes impacting global leadership, including:

• Economics of global integration: growth, trade, regulation and deregulation
• The role of science and technology: climate change, the internet, technological interconnectedness, cyber security
• International governance and government of the nation-state: the UN, WTO and trade agreements, the European Union and Brexit
• Social challenges of and to global integration: migration, refugees, inequality and intolerance
• The new politics of support and opposition to global integration: nationalism and internationalism, security and conflict
• Personal development and leadership skills

Fellowship Coverage

Each fellowship includes:

• Full programme fees
• Living expenses for the duration of the fellowship
• Return economy flight from India to the UK

Eligibility

To be eligible for the Chevening Gurukul Fellowship for Leadership and Excellence applicants must:

• Be a citizen of India and currently live in the country. Must not hold British nationality.
• Have at least ten years’ work experience prior to applying
• Be a mid-career professional with strong leadership potential in a wide range of sectors including state or central government, private sector, media, and civil society
• Have a good working knowledge of English to be assessed by a qualified English language assessor
• Have a postgraduate level qualification or equivalent professional training or work experience in a relevant area at the time of application
• Agree to adhere to all relevant guidelines, requirements and expectations of the programme.