It is not uncommon to hear stories about change makers creating ripples of change in different capacities within the education sector. However, fortunately, and unfortunately these stories majorly feature change makers from within the urban areas and metropolitan cities like Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad etc.

This story is about Surender Yadav and his team – Biswajit Brahmma, Akash Mishra along with his college batchmates Lucky Gautam and Shyam, who are creating circles of love, trust and friendship within the community through their organisation, Self Reliant India in an endeavour to open pathways of opportunities for students of a small village, Raliawas and other neighbouring villages in District Rewari, Haryana.

Surender (first from right) and his team comprising of Gandhi Fellows and VIT batchmates

Surender is an engineer, B.Tech from Vellore Institute of Technology. Post his engineering, Surender became a part of Gandhi Fellowship 2015-17 batch. The problem that Surender and his team are trying to address is complex, multi-faceted and seems obscure at least till we scratch below the surface.

“The children and the families who live in poverty, till the time they come out of poverty, they won’t get good opportunities and even if they do, they will drop out. SRI will work with those students who get an opportunity to get a world-class education and later on they get opportunities and are able to financially sustain their families”, says Surender Yadav.

The long-term vision of Self Reliant India is that no one should remain in poverty and every single child without exception must get the quality education. If every child gets a quality education, they will not be stuck in the vicious cycle of poverty. What drives them on a daily basis is that not a single child should be deprived of an excellent education because of lack of resources and finances.

A Nanhe Kalam Centre being run by Self Reliant India volunteers

Self Reliant India has a two-fold program in the schools that they engage with – Nanhe Kalam and Whole School Transformation.

As a part of their flagship program, Nanhe Kalam, they run classes for Mathematics and Reasoning in Hindi. The end goal of Nanhe Kalam is to empower the enrolled students to secure admission into Jawahar Navodya Vidyalayas, residential schools, fully funded by the Ministry of HRD. There is one Navodya School in every District of the country and the students gain admission into Grade VI through a highly competitive entrance exam.

Once they get into an agreement with the local government schools, they start running classes for a total of 2 hours after school. The teachers who help children prepare for the entrance exam are locals who are aspiring teachers, preparing for JBT and B.Ed. The most heart touching part is that all of them are working with Self Reliant India as volunteers, inducted after a rigorous selection process – a written test and interview by the local BEO(Block Education Officer).

Surender and his team conduct monthly capacity building workshops for the volunteer teachers. The purpose is to equip them with the latest pedagogy, best teaching practices which they are going to use in their roles as future teachers. They also conduct weekly assessments of the students to gauge their progress which is then conveyed to the parents during the most joyful and lively Parent-Teacher Meetings.

Team Building activities being conducted during monthly capacity building workshops

The second program that Self Reliant India is working on is Whole School Transformation. While in the short run, they are preparing students to secure an admission in Navodya Schools, in the long run, they are working on programs that will transform the entire school system and make every government school in Haryana at par with Navodya.

The sight that touches the hearts of many visitors, melts away their doubts and arouses boundless hope is the way Self Reliant India has involved parents, community, school staff and other stakeholders like family. Surendra and his team do not need extensive stakeholder management plans as they have created an atmosphere of a harmonious family within the school system in Raliawas. When appreciated for their work, the people present over there feel shy to take the credit for themselves and instead pass on the credit to others as a sign of respect.

The Gandhian principles that Surender and his team have cultivated have inculcated a sense of family within the ecosystem that they work.

“It is one of our values of not creating parallel structures next to the government, as we believe in working with the administration because only and only the government has the prowess to reach the last child and the existing machinery has full potential to deliver the change. Our initiative involves administration in all the stages of the project from selection, monitoring and felicitating the volunteer”; …