Initiatives by NGOs, backed by industry and committed individuals, promise to achieve what governments could not.
Volunteerism can often achieve what a government or an organisation can’t. For the individual is backed by a passion that often cannot be replicated by a faceless department or institution.
Take Satheesh Sharma, a Delhi-based businessman. His day job today is climbing holy mountains in Uttaranchal’s Kedarnath and Badrinath, that is, when he is not persuading friends in industry and the government to help him procure enough portable oxygen cylinders for pilgrims who visit the Hemkunt Sahib. In two years he got enough donations to set up a clinic for pilgrims at a height of 10,000 feet. No one asked him to do it. He has no organisation either. But now he finds many companies donating medicines and cash to buy cylinders to help the pilgrims. His latest project is providing surgical aid to a family of blind people.
There have been few attempts in India to tap volunteerism for public good. Recently, Times Foundation launched the Teach India campaign, which has now merged into the Read India campaign of NGO Pratham. Students and others are finding in the campaign an opportunity to volunteer for a public goal.
Another huge campaign is taking wings in the form of a branch of Teach for America. This campaign, called Teach for India, has support from Teach India.
Students and those who have passed out of college are being asked to apply. Top companies and NGOs are backing the effort. Dell Foundation and Thermax Foundation are some of the main players, with NGO Akanksha, which has been running municipal schools in Mumbai on a public-private partnership mode, actually running the programme.
The programme will for the first time give industries a permanent window of opportunity to be a part of volunteerism, a prospect that is attractive, especially in these times of cost-cutting. The programme has offered to absorb employees and pay them half their salary for two years provided the company continues to pay them the other half. An NGO, I Volunteer, approached companies with such a proposition.
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But a programme embracing every nook and corner of the country and promising to wipe out educational inequity by getting the most qualified people to teach in some of the most neglected schools could be grabbed by employees who might be feeling unwanted in their companies. The organisers are hoping as good a response from the student community as well.
In June 2009, Teach For India will place 100 fellows in English-medium schools in Pune and Mumbai. By its fifth year, it aims to place approximately 2,000 fellows in eight metropolitan cities and their surrounding rural districts.
The idea is to become a perennial source for good teachers so that the poorest children don’t have to make do with indifferent and unqualified ones.
The original programme, that is, Teach for America, started two decades ago as a research project of a college student named Wendy Kopp. But today it is a resource bank for schools in the US with 34 per cent teaching volunteers opting to stay on even after two years. So far, 14,000 volunteers from the programme have taught in American schools. TFA recruits college graduates to teach for two years and puts them through a five-year training. Most elite graduate schools now vie with each other to send volunteers for the programme,
If this success story repeats itself in India, it could be the way forward for volunteerism in other sectors as well, beginning with a Heal India campaign or a Clean India campaign, or a.million other ways to help.