The Anand Paul Education Support Programme was launched in Feb 2010, to invest in the community in and around Park Street, Kolkata, the place from where the Apeejay Surrendra Group established its office and business presence.
The Anand Paul Education Support Programme is a new approach – it reaches into the slums and literally delivers support at the doorstep, thereby making it easier for aspirants to adopt it. Under this programme, we opened education centers in local club-rooms and community halls. We opened 10 centres in association with CINI Asha and Focus, NGOs who have done great work in this area.
The objective of the programme was to identify children from the poorest areas around Park Street, who had either dropped out of school or were not enrolled in school, and help them return to school. These were children who could easily fall through the cracks of the system, lose the advantages of an education and thus lose the ability to change the quality of their lives.
During the time we noticed that many of the children, who had already been enrolled and mainstreamed into schools, were tending to slip back and were in the danger of dropping out again. The solution to this issue lay in giving such children remedial support, so that they could keep up with the academics and not lose interest in going to school. A total of 450 children benefitted from the remedial support that was given in the centres.
During the time that the children’s schools programme was being implemented, the programme officers were often approached by the mothers of the children, requesting a literacy programme for themselves.
When a multi-generational approach to education is applied, mother and child are both engaged in similar activities and the adult’s tendency to divert the child’s attention and effort to other tasks reduces sharply. Thus in response, we introduced the Adult Literacy and Skill Training for Livelihood Generation initiative and opened 2 centres for imparting literacy and life skills training to the mothers. We are proud to be a catalyst of change in the lives of atleast 50 women.
