There?s a lot in common between 14-year-old Preet Kumari, a resident of Mand Jumana near Ludhiana and 10-year-old Manish from Sopra in Jodhpur. Unlike most children their age, who walk to school and run back home, Manish and Preet run to school and walk back home. School is not a punishment or an essential exercise for them, it is a process that they enjoy ? all the more because their learning doesn?t translate into a burden for their parents. Their education is free and the uniforms, books, stationery and mid-day meals are also taken care of.
?I like studying in this school? I like the way the teachers here teach ? it?s fun? especially the computers,? says Manish, son of a farmer, who shifted from a government school to the Satya Bharti school a year ago. More than 50% of the day?s activities are planned outdoors to give children an opportunity to explore their surroundings and learn through observation. The school, set up a year ago by Bharti Foundation, has 190 children on rolls. Prior to Satya Bharti, there were two private schools and a government school in this little hamlet called Sopara. Both the private schools have shut shop since, and it took parents no time to shift their children to Satya Bharti. ?The parents compared our education with that of the rest of the schools. They liked the idea that despite being a Hindi medium school, we lay emphasis on English,? says Padam Singh, a teacher there. This perhaps was one of the factors that also led some relatively better-off families to shift their children from the private school to Satya Bharti. ?It was inevitable. Those schools only indulged in commodification of education. They were least interested in the welfare of the children?, says Karnaramji Godara, a community member.
Recently, the President of India, Pratibha Devisingh Patil inaugurated a Satya Bharti school in the same district in village Lordi Dejgara. The school has been set up under the aegis of Bharti Foundation?s (the philanthropic arm of Bharti Enterprises set up in the year 2000 with a dedicated corpus of Rs 200 crore) Satya Bharti School Program, which aims to provide quality education to underprivileged children in rural India. The Foundation aims to set up 500 Satya Bharti Primary Schools and 50 Senior Secondary cum Vocational Training Schools in villages across India by 2010, to reach out to over 2,00,000 children. Currently, 161 Satya Bharti Primary Schools are operational across Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand reaching over 13,000 children.
?While India makes impressive strides with its rapid economic growth, 300 million children in the age group of seven years and above do not have access to education,? said Rajan Bharti Mittal, MD, Bharti Enterprises at the inauguration of the school in Lordi Dejgara. The company believes education is an important tool to bring about social and economic transformation, especially those in rural areas. Their aim, therefore, is to reach the poorest of the poor.? A multi-stakeholder model, the Foundation has also partnered with the governments of Punjab, Rajasthan, Haryana and Tamil Nadu, and has so far adopted nine government schools across Neemrana and Amer.