Yes, they also make scholars

Updated on: Thursday, June 23, 2011

As he waited to catch a flight at Hyderabad's old airport in December 2008, a man in his 60s retrieved a flute and started to play it. He soon had an audience of mostly young corporatetypes and some students, all waiting to catch various flights. NGO Pratham's 'US Ambassador' Yogi Patel had his audience's rapt attention . He stopped playing and asked them questions, which were designed, he said, "to let people vent their feelings, their hopes and fears, their anger and apathy" .

If Patel's way of engaging citizens was unique, it really showed Pratham's singular focus and diligence : to address the content of education imparted in schools and work in a three-way partnership between businesses, government and civil society. What started as running simple pre-school centers in Mumbai expanded to such an extent that Pratham's team were soon mapping lacunae in the learning process at the primary level, pinpointing inefficiencies and demonstrating how enrolment figures could not be seen as the sole measure of school education.

Running a school has been a favoured form of philanthropy for hundreds of small and medium industrialists . But the last decade has seen corporate houses tackle the challenge of universal education in a variety of ways. If Pratham is about catalyzing and optimizing resources, the Shiv Nadar Foundation has gone niche, providing state-of-the-art facilities to toppers from rural schools. The iconic Azim Premji Foundation waits for its first batch of students to join the Azim Premji University while NIIT already runs a not-forprofit one.

It was Pratham's belief that bundling a child into school was simply not enough. In a recent interview, founder Madhav Chavan said, "We built programmes that took into account shortage of resources, space and trained manpower , but still worked on scale." This approach led to a number of programmes, from English learning to teacher training, from setting up libraries to scholarship programmes . Powered by the super league of philanthropists including Hewlett-Gates and the Google Foundations, it has India Inc. honchos such as Kumar Manglam Birla and Mukesh Ambani as trustees.

Conviction that smarter children from less privileged areas can be scholastically excellent too given the right conditions to study, inspired the setting up of the Vidyagyan school in Ballabhgarh in 2009. Daughter of HCL's founder Shiv Nadar, Roshni, who is one of India's five billionaire heiresses, is spearheading the Vidyagyan effort . Vidyagyan's vision is to build future leaders from rural India via high quality school education.

At a cost of Rs 60 crore, the sprawling 20-acre residential campus complete with language and maths labs, is home to 200 of the brightest from among 10 and 11-year old village kids: from 20 UP districts. It was the first of seven such schools planned by the Shiv Nadar Foundation.

The initiative found many detractors who feared the Rs 1 lakh investment per child per year excessive . But the idea, says Roshni, is to create future leaders: the best from rural India. "Why compromise on facilities on the basis of background?" Not that getting the village kids to settle into a firm, if kind, routine was easy. To begin with, the kids refused to eat the foilwrapped rotis, which they regarded with much disdain, being used to rotis straight off mom's tawa. Then they refused the mattresses, finding sleeping on the floor much more comfortable.

If Vidyagyan's is a niche and exclusive innovation, the Satya Bharti Schools, run by the Bharti Foundation, aim at mass presence. Started in 2006 with 242 primary schools across Punjab, Rajasthan, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal, setting up primary and senior secondary level schools is the focus. Bharti Foundation has its own schools and also partners to run government schools.

The bulk of the corporate philanthropic presence in the education sector is at the primary and secondary levels.

While the government seems to want corporate presence in higher education also on charitable lines, it's not a sector that corporate houses are viewing as an area to be developed as part of charity. But even here, some corporate houses are making their presence felt.

In a not-for-profit venture, the NIIT University was set up by Rajendra Pawar, founder of India's pioneer IT training institute. Totted as Pawar's pet project, the NIIT University in Rajasthan's Neemrana is run by the NIIT Foundation and is a low-fee , not-for-profit university . "You don't need to be a philanthropist . For us, the idea is to provide employability training via a self-sustaining model," said a Foundation official.

Times of India

Yes, they also make scholars

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