Kozhikode: Living in ordinary situations, where her parents were ready to sacrifice their comfort to give the best education to their children, N.P. Pranitha was not much worried about the schooling she had.
Born to a middle-class family in Kannur, where her father was a small-scale business person and mother a homemaker, she had her primary education in an aided school in Wayanad, where the family lives now.
After her schooling, her parents sent her to Kannur, to have better education and she completed her BSc and MSc in botany and wanted to research the subject.
Ms Pranitha’s fate and the concept of life changed when she joined a course at Centre for Research and Education for Social Transformation (CREST) in Kozhikode during a short interval between registering for the project and before getting approval for the same. At CREST, she found how blessed she was to have a quality education.
“We were part of a project during the professional development course. Nearly 40 of us in the batch had to conduct tuition for the children of Vellayil fishermen colony and Kakkoor, every Sunday and Saturday,” she says.
“For five months, we visited the area and interacted with the families who could not take better care of the children. But this made me think that there are better areas that need my services.”
She got an intimation to join as a lab assistant at Kerala State Pollution Control Board soon after she finished the course at CREST in May 2014.
She did not think twice before picking up the latest offer as a research fellow at ‘Teach for India’, an NGO that visits schools in rural India to train the students. There are some 300 schools under the care of this NGO and 118 follows from Tamil Nadu alone conducts classes in the rural schools of the state.
“Our vision is that one day, all children will attain an excellent education. Ninety percent of the children do not enter the college, 40 percent in Class III cannot recognise numbers till 100 and 52 percent of Class V children cannot read a Class II textbook. This situation should change,” she says.
