The first children’s library of the EducationWorld Foundation’s Mission Memorial Libraries project was recently inaugurated at the Parikrma Centre for Learning, Sahakarnagar, Bangalore, a free-of-charge K-12 school established for underprivileged children from slum households
The first of the Bangalore-based EducationWorld Foundation’s Mission Million Memorial Libraries project to enable self and supplementary learning by children in under-resourced schools countrywide, was formally inaugurated in Bangalore on November 7. The Malati & Vinoo Thakore Memorial Library, established within the Parikrma Centre for Learning, Sahakarnagar, Bangalore will contain 5,000 volumes, including a full set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Time-Life Series 20 journal subscriptions, and a fully-wired and Internet-connected computer equipped with digital resources. This K-12 Parikrma school affiliated with the Central Board of Secondary Education, has 430 boys and girls mentored by 32 teachers on its muster rolls.
The first library under this project to raise learning outcomes in the country’s estimated 1.20 million under-resourced schools, was inaugurated following a donation of Rs.5 lakh contributed by Dilip, Anil and Shyama Thakore, Summiya Yasmeen and Bharati Thakore in memory of the late Malati & Vinoo Thakore, who made numerous contributions for the education of children of the Indian community in Tanzania, and Hessargatta (Karnataka) during their lifetime.
“There are over 60 million middle class households in India. Most of them are ready, indeed anxious, to commemorate the memory of their parents, siblings and/or loved friends and relations who worked unobtrusively for the public good. The EW Foundation’s Mission Million Memorial Libraries project offers them a model to establish similar libraries for underprivileged children in under-resourced schools. It’s well established that by reading and collaborative study, children and youth can dramatically improve their learning outcomes. Therefore, we willingly pooled our savings for the first Mission Million Memorial Library in this well-administered school of the Parikrma Humanity Foundation which provides excellent English-medium education to children from bottom-of-the pyramid slum households in Bangalore/Bengaluru. I hope this first library established under the aegis of the EducationWorld Foundation will be an inspiration for the establishment of an additional 999,999 memorial libraries,” said Dilip Thakore, editor of EducationWorld magazine and a trustee of the EW Foundation, speaking on the occasion. A former barrister of the Bombay high court and first editor of Business India and Businessworld, Dilip Thakore and Summiya Yasmeen co-promoted EducationWorld in 1999.
“My parents were committed educationists. Therefore they not only gifted us with high quality education in India and the UK, but also promoted an English-medium primary school in Arusha, Tanzania for the benefit of the Indian community there,” recalls Shyama Thakore, a sociology graduate of Kingston University, UK and currently a Shepperton (UK)-based citizens rights advisor.
Adds Anil Thakore, an alumnus of the Royal College of Agriculture, Cirencester (UK) and the College Tropical Agriculture (Trinidad) of the University of West Indies, and currently promoter-chairman of Avity Agrotech Pvt. Ltd, an agriculture machinery manufacturing company: “When I was running a farm in Hessargatta, near Bangalore, my mother ran informal classes in English, math and personal hygiene for the children of farm labour.”
Shukla Bose, founder-CEO of Parikrma Humanity Foundation (PHF, estb.2003), welcomed the gift of a formal library in PHF’s very first school. “In Parikrma, we are great believers in the power of self-learning and strongly encourage children to supplement classroom learning with self-education. We also believe that children from low-income and underprivileged households should be fluent in English which is the link language of India, and a great social equaliser. Therefore, we deeply
appreciate the gift of this library which will give our children the smell, feel and pleasure of reading and borrowing new books and educational CD-ROMs that will enable them to learn and cultivate interests beyond the school curriculum. I earnestly hope this first library of the EW Foundation’s Mission Million Memorial Libraries project will inspire people within India’s large middle class to follow this example.”
PARIKRMA HUMANITY FOUNDATION
The Parikrma Humanity Foundation was registered in Bangalore in 2003 by Shukla Bose, an alumna of Jadavpur University and IIM-Calcutta who quit a high-profile 26-year corporate career (Oberoi Hotels, Dalmia Resorts and Resort Condominium of India) to address the national problem of a widening gap between privately and publicly provided K-12 education. “The quality of education delivered to children from low-income households is so poor that they cannot escape the circle of poverty in later life. Our intent was to establish affordable model schools 
which could be replicated for public education countrywide,” says Bose. Since then, PHF has promoted four free-of-charge English-medium K-12 schools and a junior college educating 1,700 children from four orphanages and 72 slum habitations of Bangalore. Moreover in 2014, PHF established an Education Transformation Centre in Bangalore. Thus far, it has trained 160 teachers and 80 headmasters of 200 government schools in Karnataka after signing an MoU with the state government.
EDUCATIONWORLD FOUNDATION
The EducationWorld Foundation is an affiliate organisation of EducationWorld — The Human Development Magazine, a sui generis education (monthly) newsmagazine promoted in 1999 to “build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda”. Since then, EW has established an unrivalled position as India’s — arguably Asia’s — #1 education news and analysis magazine with over 1 million readers.
The holding company of EW — D.T. Media & Entertainment Pvt. Ltd — also comprises books, films production, events management, and coffee table books divisions and hosts an Internet portal (www.educationworld.in) managed by an affiliated company. And last year, it also began publishing its second print magazine ParentsWorld for young parents.
PAROMITA SENGUPTA