Challenges to Identify and Mentor Gifted Children in Developing Countries: The Indian Experience

The National Education Policy 2020 (NEP-2020) has recognized the need to identify and nurture gifted and talented children beyond the school curriculum. Through systematic research, the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru has developed multiple protocols for identifying and multi-level, multi-stage mentoring of gifted children. This study argues that there is need for a paradigm shift in the identification process that predominantly uses psychometric measurements in the portfolio that captures the actual data points of gifted children. This is particularly relevant for developing countries like India, which has a diverse population predominantly from disadvantaged communities. Establishing norms for standardized psychometric tests developed for the western populations will have inherent limitations to identifying the gifted children in multi-lingual and multi-cultural contexts. Needless to state, India has far too few trained psychologists to accomplish this task.