“I had career goals, now I set myself happiness goals. Giving and getting happiness in return,” says Pracheta Sharma, and somehow that does not sound one bit corny. Sharma, along with two other friends Mainak Roy and Rahul Bhanot, is working on a project called Taleem. It is primarily to educate children in rural Kashmir and help the headmasters and teachers of the schools to achieve their goals. “They are young, enthusiastic and they want to do better. They just need someone to provide them with the right exposure and tools, she explains.
“We have invested our dreams in Taleem,” Sharma says simply. Taleem is a project of Simple Education Foundation started in September 2014 by Bhanot and Roy. Sharma joined them in 2015 after a month-long teaching stint in rural Kashmir. Taleem will focus on a mentor-supported teacher training model and also build on developing leadership skills with school principals. As a pilot initiative, supported by the Directorate of Education, Kashmir region, Taleem will be implemented in 10 rural schools in Bandipore and Srinagar districts. In the first year, SEF-Taleem will work with a total of 20 teachers and 10 principals in these schools, to improve the learning outcomes of nearly 2,000 children.
There are many young men and women like Sharma who are committing themselves to improving education, especially in low-income group schools across the country. “We are probably the only escape routes for the kids and we can create windows for them to see the world. This realisation changed the way I looked at things,” says Dhanush C. Kumar, an engineer who taught in an extremely underprivileged school in a communally sensitive area in Hyderabad and now works for the NGO Teach for India (TFI), liaising with the government, overseeing classroom activities, and engaging with the community where the schools are located.
“I choose to work here because I can change the way kids see and feel things. The lessons they learn is a direct result of my action.” Dhanush says he saw what poverty and lack of exposure could do to kids.
But he also saw how the right intervention made all the difference in their lives and the community’s.
It is not just about the three Rs of reading, writing and arithmetic. People like Sharma and Kumar go beyond the classroom. A TFI Fellow, Nolina Mishra, 22, and her co-fellows not only teach children aged 8 to 12, but have also set up a life skill centre called Gubbare. The initiative helps the mothers of the students to earn a livelihood. “We tell them about government welfare schemes; we discuss health matters; how they can provide affordable yet nutritious meals for their families. We try and provide opportunities, which give them a sense of purpose and self-worth.”
Some mothers now cater food for school functions, but the biggest success has been the change in attitude towards the women and children in the community. Now teaching girls in a school in Sangam Vihar in Delhi, supposed to be Asia’s largest unauthorised colony, Mishra says it’s the best decision she has made in her life.
Incredibly, money doesn’t seem to be pivotal in the lives of these young men and women. “Money is important, but I just don’t use that as the motivator. The pay is good enough to live decently. One reorients one’s lifestyle,” says Sharma. “It is like journalism. Or academia. You know you will never make a lot of money, but you will have immense exposure and the learning curve is massive. That helps.”
Money, says Mishra, is nothing to the fulfilment she enjoys in this job. She is overwhelmed by the trust and faith the children and their parents repose in her. “I don’t ever want to let them down. Even on bad days, this trust keeps me going. I see the best of life here and I see the worst. I feel helpless frustration, but I have learnt that I can’t undo what has happened, but my girls can change the future if I teach them the right values.”
When Vikas Plakkot and Neha Sahu started an NGO called Just for Kicks (JFK), it was to develop values and life skills through football. “Everyone Plays” is JFK’s motto. “We are working in over 120 low-income schools with more than 1,000 kids across Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore and Hyderabad. While it is about football, the kids learn as they play — that you win some and you lose some. We believe sport teaches them to handle stress and emotions, and breaks down barriers of gender, community, class and caste.”
JFK organises inter-school football tournaments called School Football Championships. Like most Indians, Plakkot, 26, studied engineering. But he knew that was not his calling. He believes that sports taught him a lot more than a school or college education did and so he used it as an aid when he began to teach underprivileged children. “Kids barely spoke to each other. All that changed with football, and along with fun, there was camaraderie and teamwork. Potential dropouts began coming to school because of the football. We realised that the children needed a third place beyond home and school, where they can be themselves. What was an experiment took off and grew organically till starting JFK was the natural thing to do,” says Plakkot. He and Sahu, a graduate of New York University, now have eight fulltime employees and 25 coaches (Certified by All India Football Federation) who set goals for their wards. JFK works with affluent schools with a programme called Soccer Connections for which it charges a fee. “Ours is a resource-intensive programme. We have to kit out our kids and I realise CSR in sports is not very popular. So we need a source of income in order to keep our social enterprise going.”
Another person who sees sports as a great metaphor for life is Anirban Ghosh, 30, who runs an NGO called Khel Khel Mein (KKM). Ghosh is an engineer who worked in the corporate world for six years. But KKM was his calling and today it mentors 6,000 children across Delhi. “We believe in holistic education through sports,” he says. KKM also works with youngsters in low-income areas and encourages them to organise sporting activities.
“About 60 per cent of the kids who make up the teams are girls,” says Ghosh. KKM is now working with a rural Buddhist school in Kishtwar. “We teach the kids about fair play and teamwork through sports. We design sports curriculum and training capsules. Emotional intelligence is our focus; not many think of that inside classrooms,” he says. And no, he is not making anywhere near the salary he once drew in the corporate world, he laughs.
Soumya Jain, 30, is also a former engineer who held a plum job. He gave it up to start the I Teach movement in Pune. “We want to start a chain of affordable secondary schools for the poorest of our nation’s children,” he says. As he points out, although the Right to Education grants free and compulsory education for all children from 6 to 14 years of age, only a few make it to the higher classes.
What motivates these people? Says Jain, “It came to a point when I could not read India-related news without feeling an enormous sense of guilt. I wanted to contribute in some way and teaching seemed to offer that chance. I want to bring the entrepreneurial spirit and efficiency of the private sector to education.”
He quietly adds, “I want to serve my country.”
Shaheen Mistry who founded Teach For India believes that this movement, besides teaching children, is also committed to building, in parallel, a force of leaders who will demonstrate, inspire and catalyse systemic change - until the day comes when all children across India attain an excellent education. She says: “Teach For India Fellows take small real steps each day towards the daunting vision of eliminating educational inequity. They make three commitments: to start by changing themselves, to work collectively and to never lose sight of how precious every child is. Our Fellows are multipliers. In the Fellowship they impact a limited number of kids, beyond that they think bigger.
Thirty per cent of India’s population is below the age of 14 with 12 million young adults joining the workforce every year. However, only 48 per cent of 5th grade children can read a grade two text. Thirty two per cent of grade two children cannot recognize numbers and 50 per cent of grade five children cannot do basic subtraction (Aser Report 2014).
