Hamari Pathshala - Case Studies - Reliance Group India

Hamari Pathshala is a campaign to motivate communities to enroll their school drop-out children into remedial centres. Such remedial centreshave been established at adopted government primary schools across villages nearby our plants/sites to ensure quality education among the primary school students by focusing on the irregular and weaker students.Our partners for this endeavor include NGOs like Gramodays, Ruchika and district government education departments.

Challenge - Most of the school drop-out students from underprivileged communities do so because of household chores being ladled on them by their own uneducated parents. These children thus miss out on education during their important formative years.

Intervention - Reliance CSR Teams across the Group in collaboration with credible NGOs, and in concurrence with Government Education initiativesembarked on surveys across adopted villages and met with members from below-poverty-linecommunitiesto convince them to enrolltheir school drop-out childrenat remedial centers.

At these centres, students are offered an attractive and enjoyable learning atmosphere through a play-and-learn model.The objective is to provide them a holistic education which brings about a change in their interest in education, thereby enabling them to show significant improvement in their learning capabilities.Over a period of time these children are mainstreamed into schools.

To ensure the children get access to quality education, workshops are conducted for teachers to upgrade their skills at regular intervals.Parent Teacher Children (PTC)Meetings are organised every month wherein the child’s progress is assessed alongwith the parents.

Priyanka’s Story

Name : Priyanka
Village – Joganadi, Odisha
Education Status - 3rd standard student
Economical Status – BPL

Beneficiary Journey Priyanka is the second girl child in her family. Priyanka’s family comprises of 10 members all living together in poor conditions. Her father, a tea seller at the local bus stand, earnednegligiblewages, and had wanted a son.

As is common in such communities, Priyanke hence suffered from neglect and often hunger for most of her early childhood. Although she was enrolled inthe local government school, she was often made to participate in household chores, hence missed a lot of her classes; severely impacting her studies.

She was identified in the Baramunda Godam Sahi slum by our NGO partner, Ruchika’s remedial teacher. With constant family counseling Priyanka started going to school regularly. With her hard work and commitment to education, she did well at the remedial school.And this year, her efforts paid off as she stood first in her class(Grade III) at Joganadi Primary School.

Priyanka now is an ambassador for the programme in her slum and encourages all her friends to join her in school every day.

Beneficiary Quote - “I enjoy going to school.I am so happy now.I want to become a doctor in the future.”