Charity and scholarships only solution, feels Chairman Siddharth Shriram.
Mawana Sugar Mills is one of the oldest and largest sugar producers in the country. Controlled by Siddharth Shriram, it now wants to bring high-quality affordable education to all through its charity arm, Mawana Social Service.
Shriram, the chairman of the company, says that backwardness in the interiors of India will not go away till education seeps in and becomes accessible in terms of quality as well as quantity. He sees charity and scholarships as the only solution for making the best affordable to the very poor.
These schools, says he, will measure up to almost 80 per cent of the best public schools in the country, and the cost for every student would come to Rs 15,000 per annum including books and uniforms. Shriram wants to start this experiment with a school already being run by the company in its mill premises in this town in west Uttar Pradesh and then replicate it elsewhere in the country.
Last month, Mawana Social Service began the initiative with a project to upgrade and modify its own factory school in Mawana. The school has only children of workers, while children of higher officials choose to study elsewhere. It has barely enough rooms to accommodate the 150 odd children who study there up to the 8th standard and has about 20 teachers.
Plans are afoot to shift these children along with new admissions to a new building that is nearing completion in the mill campus where the present school exists.
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Mawana Social Service President Priya Somaiya led an interactive session with students and parents, who were mostly workers of the mill, discussing plans to change the way the school now runs.
Parents complained that the fees were unaffordable. And Somaiya was seen assuring them that the meeting was meant to get their feedback and to find solutions. The parents gave free vent to their problems with the school at present. They wanted filtered drinking water and transportation. Kusum Devi, the mother of one student, complained that teachers don’t write the homework in Hindi and as a result that parents like her cannot understand it.
Undaunted by the challenges, Somaiya says that the main admission criterion for the schools would be poverty and those who can pay higher fees can go elsewhere. The first lot of 20 children from the below-poverty category will soon be virtually adopted by the school. As for the fee of Rs 15,000, which the mill workers are now willy-nilly paying, the foundation plans to create scholarships through a specific donation programme where well-to-do families and individuals can contribute.
Somaiya said that the school now affiliated to the Uttar Pradesh Education Board but will soon shift to the CBSE syllabus. The model will be replicated in other parts of the sugar belt, beginning first with Muzaffarnagar where Mawana has more sugar mills.
The idea is to give, “affordable, secular and high quality of education, so that students should remain in their community and be proud of it,” says Somaiya. The new lot of students will join from the nursery level. There would be no admissions in other classes; so the school will ensure that it takes care of the child right from the beginning.
