09 june 2011
Satya Bharti School, Nangal Mundi, has just three classrooms for the students of classes I to V who study here in two shifts. But the rooms are large, airy and clean, and decorated with colourful cut-outs of alphabets and fruits.
The school has six teachers who use aids such as flash cards and instructional CDs played on laptops to teach the around 130 children on the rolls. There's a well-tended lawn, a sand pit and a computer that students are allowed operate on their own. The toilets -- separate for boys and girls -- are squeaky clean. How many primary schools in even the big metros can boast of all these facilities?
Nangal Mundi, however, is no city or even a town; it's a village of 2,000 on the cusp of rural and urban in Haryana's Rewari district. Satya Bharti School, too, is no private schools charging hefty fees, but a charitable one run by the Bharti Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the Mittals, for poor students.
It is vastly superior to the Government Primary School just 50 metres away, where all but one of the dark and stuffy classrooms are locked, and students from classes I to V are taught in one group by a single teacher.
Students don't have textbooks because the government issues are yet to reach, and all that they get as midday meal is a thin broth of porridge with some milk and sugar. The meal served at Satya Bharti School looks hearty in comparison -- roti, chana and aloo-subzi.
"If India has to be the backyard for providing workforce within the country and the world, then education needs to be taken deep into rural India," says Rakesh Bharti Mittal, co-chairman of the Bharti Foundation. And how effective has the effort been?
"In Neemrana, when we first took in students they had bleached hair. But one year in the school and it started turning black, because the mid-day meal the children were getting was probably their only nutritious meal in the day," says he. Mittal also points to the high 96-98 per cent that Satya Bharti students have scored in board examinations in Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan.
Little Mahima and Ravina at Satya Bharti School in Kohrar, in a remote corner of Rewari, are examples of the transformation education can bring.
Daughters of a small trader and a farmer, respectively, whose fathers had studied till class X and mothers never went to school, the class V students are at the computer, rearranging jumbled-up sentences in English -- shuffling "wall the boy on sat the" to "the boy sat on the wall" -- clicking on each word and dragging it to its right place in the sentence. Their summer vacations are kept short -- they may otherwise forget all they have learnt in school.
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The school has six teachers who use aids such as flash cards and instructional CDs played on laptops to teach the around 130 children on the rolls. There's a well-tended lawn, a sand pit and a computer that students are allowed operate on their own. The toilets -- separate for boys and girls -- are squeaky clean. How many primary schools in even the big metros can boast of all these facilities?
Nangal Mundi, however, is no city or even a town; it's a village of 2,000 on the cusp of rural and urban in Haryana's Rewari district. Satya Bharti School, too, is no private schools charging hefty fees, but a charitable one run by the Bharti Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the Mittals, for poor students.
It is vastly superior to the Government Primary School just 50 metres away, where all but one of the dark and stuffy classrooms are locked, and students from classes I to V are taught in one group by a single teacher.
Students don't have textbooks because the government issues are yet to reach, and all that they get as midday meal is a thin broth of porridge with some milk and sugar. The meal served at Satya Bharti School looks hearty in comparison -- roti, chana and aloo-subzi.
"If India has to be the backyard for providing workforce within the country and the world, then education needs to be taken deep into rural India," says Rakesh Bharti Mittal, co-chairman of the Bharti Foundation. And how effective has the effort been?
"In Neemrana, when we first took in students they had bleached hair. But one year in the school and it started turning black, because the mid-day meal the children were getting was probably their only nutritious meal in the day," says he. Mittal also points to the high 96-98 per cent that Satya Bharti students have scored in board examinations in Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan.
Little Mahima and Ravina at Satya Bharti School in Kohrar, in a remote corner of Rewari, are examples of the transformation education can bring.
Daughters of a small trader and a farmer, respectively, whose fathers had studied till class X and mothers never went to school, the class V students are at the computer, rearranging jumbled-up sentences in English -- shuffling "wall the boy on sat the" to "the boy sat on the wall" -- clicking on each word and dragging it to its right place in the sentence. Their summer vacations are kept short -- they may otherwise forget all they have learnt in school.
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