Phase wise development plan for the pilot school!

Schools for India’s pilot project in Jotuka Village, Darbhanga,Bihar is taking shape as per plan with the GIS mapping of the entire project site completed last week. We are expecting the detailed site specific drawings to be completed by June 2012. We will be posting the regular updates!!

Alongside with various projects Schools for India got featured in the article being “School is In“. The article conveys the dauntless thoughts, and policy of Mr. Venkatesh Chandrasekaran Founder, Schools for India. The article also quotes well-known Blogger Mr. Kiruba Shankar (CEO, Business Blogging).

Mr. Venkatesh is Founder Trustee at Schools for India Trust, Co Chairman- Chennai Aero park Committee at Confederation of Indian Industry (CII ), President at Schools for India USA, Director at Schools for India UK and Head R&D Automotive at Satyam Computer Services Limited.

You may also read the E-version of the article here

The Classroom

The Sports Feild

Library

The Amphitheatre

Exterior

More…

As a small initiative towards changing this scenario, Schools for India has been started,with the aim of building and running schools for the rural poor in India. Their objective is to

• Build the best in class schools in India
• Best in Class Infrastructure
• Build, Operate and Transfer to local communities
• A Self Sustaining Model
• 6000 schools by the year 2020 across the country

more…

With easily accessible social media buttons linking to websites such as YouTube, Facebook, et al, now available at the top-right corner of the homepage, it has now become easier for you to track our activities on the internet. A Twitter ticker on the top of the homepage provides you with the latest tweets from Schools for India.

The blog will also be regularly updated henceforth, and we invite interested people to contribute. Please give us your feedback, and also let us know if you would like to see some changes.

When we wanted to find out how to do the survey, there were many options. We created the following process for the survey. We divided the whole survey in to three phases: 01. The secondary research 02. The primary Research 03. Analysis and decision making Before we started we did a through research and gathered the data like, how many villages are there in Vandavasi, what is the road and transport facilities available, how many schools are there, number of male/female/Children/literate in each village.

We hired a professional agency to do this job, and once they brought these data what we did was to plot the data on a large A0 size map of Vandavasi Block.

Once we did that, we were able to decide the primary survey schedule; we initially calculated that we can do two to three villages per day per person. Later we had to revise this, as some of the villages are pretty large.

The kick off was peaceful as the team from Chennai met up with the volunteers and gave an overview on what we are up to and we went through the questionnaire one by one.

We ensured that they understood the purpose and intent of each question.

We had a team of 21 volunteers and 2 supervisors.

The first village was near Vandavasi called Mummuni and we also went to the local school. By the time we finished the door to door survey it was evening and we had to leave.

The volunteers, primarily from Vandavasi area were too eager from the beginning, and really bonded well during the course of the survey.

It took us almost 25 days to go through the 212 villages, and midway we had to modify the questionnaire to fill some gaps.

Some of the findings are really useful, people are very receptive, and they have good awareness about sending their children to school.

Some of them travel more than 7 to 10 KM to go to school, and we have decided that we will run a three shift school to ensure that the children can come and learn even if they are working in the field.

And providing bus facility will greatly improve the number of children enrolling.

In my next update I will talk about our experience in conducting the Street Play.

It was a memorable occasion for the Schools for India Team as the first ever survey of the Vandavasi Block in Thiruvannamalai District, Tamilnadu was completed on 7th August 2006.

A team of 23 Volunteers went around 212 villages over 3 weeks to gather door to door information.

We gathered the list of Children below 15 years including Physically Challenged and Special Children.

We also completed the study of all the Schools in each of these villages and gathered the data regarding their infrastructure.

The high level data analysis provides excellent insight in to the needs of the people in Vandavasi.

Typically some of the children travel up to 8 KM to go to school. There is considerable awareness about the need to go to school and the main reasons for not going to school are poverty and lack of accessible facilities.

We will publish the results of the survey soon in our website. We thank the Volunteers and Schools for India team who worked tirelessly to accomplish this massive task.

Now we are all set to identify the land for our Pilot school.

http://groups.google.co.in/group/schoolsforindia?hl=en&lnk=srg