Sikshana: Making education fun for barefoot students

Bengaluru: A year-long sabbatical from work is what allowed Prasanna V.R. to pursue his passion of improving the quality of education in government schools. It started with just 35 schools, but it has now spread to over 2,000 institutions across the state.

“The idea was to come back and work in depth to see my return on investment in the form of educated children,” says a proud Prasanna, who is the CEO of Sikshana Foundation. 

The most successful concept of the NGO has been its motivational model, which has helped children, teachers and also parents to view education in new light. “Education can bear fruit only if students are interested in what they are learning and pull the inputs. Sikshana’s programmes focus on driving students to learn. In 2016, we successfully advocated this need with the state government, which is now trying to implement the model across all government schools in the state," he says.

Sikshana was founded by Mr E.S. Ramamurthy, who wanted to use his deep management experience as the general manager of a large public sector unit, to improve the quality of learning outcomes in government schools. The NGO’s management was later taken over by Mr Prasanna, who was funding it for a long time.

“I had been funding many NGOs in the state. But when I evaluated the growth of those NGOs and the funding, I felt there was a disparity and none of them had an exit strategy. But Sikshana had, and it had already adopted a few schools. This intrigued me and made me get into it fully,” he says.

Sikshana’s programmes range from making students learn good behaviour, like regular attendance, to more advanced skills, like critical thinking. To achieve these, the NGO’s employees, called Mentors, take the students through a four-step process, to launch them on a life-long learning journey. Each intervention results in learning success and encourages deeper engagement of students.  

The Foundation in collaboration with Dell is also awarding scholarships to 360 underprivileged girl children from rural parts of the state, which allows them to pursue education. An event, which is part of the programme, was held at Ramanagara on Sunday. Dignitaries from Sikshana and Ramanagara BEO Marigouda presented the scholarships to the students, who were taken on board this year. The foundation chooses six to fourteen year old students from first to eighth standards. “The foundation has also adopted 12 schools in Malleswaram in Bengaluru,” he said.  

Sikshana selects 50 deserving students for life skills training programmes to equip them with employability skills.

Within 2-3 years of adopting the motivational model, 90% of students in the 2,000 schools adopted could perform basic arithmetic which was earlier 71% of students in class 7 in rural Karnataka schools who were not able to perform basic Class 3 arithmetic.

In November 2016, Sikshana signed an MoU with the state government to deliver student motivation programmes for over 1 lakh students in 1,500 government higher primary schools in Chitradurga and Davanagere districts.

The Foundation will work with the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyana (SSA) and Department of Primary and Secondary Education over three years to develop and deliver student motivation programmes through government officials and teachers. 

The Rs 11 crore agreement has been signed under the public private partnership model, with 50% of funding coming from public and 50% from private sources.

“This is the only way we can reach some 50,000 schools across the state,” Mr Prasanna said.