Special Report

Educating slum children: Shukla Bose shows the way

Once the most innovative woman chief executive in Indian industry, Shukla Bose founder CEO of the Parikrma Humanity Foundation, Bangalore has established several English medium primary schools for slum children which offfer the hope of a break with the inegalitarian school system of the past century. Summiya Yasmeen reports

Shukla Bose with Parikrma students

Selva is one of the 620 children aged five-14 years who attend three Parikrma Centres for Learning — free kindergarten-class VII schools run by Parikrma Humanity Foundation in Bangalore (pop. 7 million), India’s infotech capital and reportedly the fastest growing city in Asia. On March 30, Parikrma celebrated its second anniversary in the Bangalore Municipal Corporation town hall packed with the schools’ children and their slum-dweller parents who rubbed shoulders with the infotech city’s most prominent citizens including police commissioner S. Mariswamy, the chief guest.

They had cause for celebration. Within two years of registration, Parikrma’s three centres in the garden city (Koramangla, Sahakarnagar, Jayanagar and a soon to be inaugurated centre at Nandhini Layout) have established themselves as model primaries which offer the hope of a break with the inegalitarian school education system of the past century or more, under which the children of the poor and socially disadvantaged were crowded into vernacular medium, indifferently serviced Dickensian-style poor schools affiliated to undemanding state boards.

The differentiating characteristic of the Parikrma schools is that all of them follow the syllabus and curriculum of the Delhi-based Council for Indian School Certificate Examinations (CISCE) board (successor to the Senior Cambridge board) which numbers 1,392 of India’s most well known private schools including the Doon School, St. Paul’s, Darjeeling, Mayo College, Ajmer, Bishop Cotton Shimla and Bangalore, and Indus International, Bangalore as blue-blood affiliates. As the currently kindergarten-class VII Parikrma schools add a higher class each year, in due course they will seek formal affiliation with CISCE to enable their students to write the class X school leaving ICSE examination. As a consequence for the first time, children of the absolute poor are accessing elementary education on a par with the superior English medium education traditionally received by the progeny of the privilegentsia.

"Parikrma Humanity Foundation was promoted as a not-for-profit company with the mission of unlocking the potential of under-served and deprived children living in urban India by providing them with the skill-sets to compete on equal terms with the children of the privileged. For example Bangalore has 1.5 million people who live in more than 800 slums. Their children are born into poverty and don’t have the education to break out of the poverty-illiteracy-poverty cycle. By providing these children equal access to quality English-medium schooling which thus far has been the privilege of the rich, Parikrma hopes to help them break this cycle and transform them into valuable contributing members of society. We provide end-to-end or e2e solutions to all our children. It’s our promise to take full responsibility for each student till he/she starts earning a living. Through its three schools PHF has made a good beginning towards achieving this objective," says Shukla Bose, an alumna of Loreto Convent, Darjeeling, Jadhavpur University and IIM-Calcutta who is the go-getting founder CEO of Parikrma, a unique initiative in delivering quality education to the underprivileged.

Bose with students: equal access motivation

After 28 years in the upper reaches of the corporate world, culminating in her appointment as managing director of RCI, Bose took a momentous career switch decision to serve India’s most vulnerable poor: children. In 2000 she accepted an offer of Christel de Haan, the promoter of RCI who after selling the company to the Cendant Corporation for a reported $7 billion (Rs.31,500 crore) had turned to philanthropy, to start Christel House — a free school for orphaned and abandoned children in Bangalore. Within two years of applying her extraordinary leadership and institution building skills which had distinguished her corporate career, Bose established Christel House as a high-profile smooth-running English-medium kg-class IV school for poor and disadvantaged children with an aggregate enrollment of 360. But in February 2003, Bose had a dramatic falling out with de Haan which churned Bangalore’s rumour mills overtime.

Refusing to take issue with de Haan with whom she had worked for many years, Bose says she quit because of incremental dilution of the administrative autonomy of the school and the infiltration of American scholastic culture and administrative norms into Christel House, India. "I have great respect for Christel with whom I worked for many years. But I can’t say the same for some of the people whom she has put on the Christel House payroll," she says.

Though disheartened by this unexpected setback, but fully involved with her own mission to empower slum children through provision of equal opportunity English language education, Bose immediately set about registering a new not-for-profit company to attain this objective. "My mission is to demonstrate that poor, under-served children in the nation’s multiplying urban slums can be transformed into responsible, productive citizens through the provision of equal education opportunity," she says.

Within three months of exiting Christel House, Bose together with four other founding members registered the Parikrma Humanity Foundation. Building on the excellent reputation she had acquired as the can-do chief executive of Christel House and thanks to an endowment by resort developer John Spence who runs the Royal Resorts chain of beach hotels around the world (including five in Goa), the first Parikrma free school for 160 Kg-class V slum children became operational on May 22, 2003 in Koramangla. Since then the foundation has persuaded Levi Strauss & Co. to sponsor its Sahakarnagar school which has an enrollment of 230 bright and eager English-speaking children.

Since the promotion of its first two learning centres in Koramangla and Sahakarnagar, Bangalore two years ago, PHF has come a long way. Today the foundation manages three centres for learning with an aggregate enrollment of 620 children instructed by 45 well qualified and mission-driven teachers. And the refreshingly distinguishing attribute of the Parikrma centres is that despite most educationists including those who have drafted the National Curriculum Framework 2005 for schools (see cover story) favouring early education in the mother tongue, they provide English-medium CISCE prescribed school education to under-served children from poor socio-economic backgrounds who have had to make do with sub-standard vernacular syllabuses prescribed by state boards of examination.

"Meaningful education is not about access but quality. Vernacular medium education prescribed by the state boards places children at a disadvantage right from the start of their lives. The hard reality is that English is the language of business and commerce and to land good jobs, fluency in written and spoken English is a mandatory requirement. We should provide poor children the education we’d like our own children to receive. Hence in Parikrma schools while we encourage the learning of one’s mother tongue, English is the medium of instruction," says Bose.

Parikrma Koramangla students: English medium instruction novelty

The education and development model followed by the three Parikrma centres which impressed the CISCE jury, comprises a high quality academic curriculum and nutrition, healthcare and community development programmes. Since almost all children are first generation learners with no previous schooling, upon enrollment they are put through a fast track three-month English speaking and writing programme. The curriculum is largely experiential and is supplemented by life skills learning including toilet and personal hygiene training. Given that Parikrma enrolls children from the base of the socio-economic pyramid, painstaking attention is paid to nutrition and health. All 620 children across the four Parikrma centres are provided with a free breakfast, lunch and a glass of protein-enriched milk before leaving school each day. Moreover they are immunised and given regular health check-ups.

"Given the reality of widespread deprivation slum-dwelling children suffer, we offer nutrition and healthcare services in addition to academic instruction. Moreover our children have the freedom to explore and excel while teachers are encouraged to become friends and mentors of students. Co-curricular education comprises life skills, music, art, dance and various sports programmes. We are only too aware that a hungry child cannot learn and hence provide 80-90 percent of each student’s nutrition requirements during school hours. This is what we mean by holistic education," says Kalpana Singh, a founding member of Parikrma and head of academics of its four schools who has 17 years of teaching experience including a nine year stint as principal of the Vidya Dayani School, Hyderabad.

Kalpana Singh: nutrition and healthcare services

Thus 210 children — 85 in the Koramangla branch and 125 in the Sahakarnagar Centre — have been identified as a mixed group with each child possessing a different learning level. Since mixed group children are those who missed the crucial early years of schooling, they are separated from the younger lot and follow Parikrma’s specially designed fast forward programme.

"Because they have either never been to school or have had very sub-standard early education, they display marked differences in learning capabilities. Mixed group children require special attention so they can catch up with the rest who tend to be younger. Therefore we have prepared a special fast forward learning programme for them which is concept-driven and hands-on. Teachers have been specially trained to help these children accelerate their learning. I’m happy to say that during the past year the learning achievements of the mixed group children have been very satisfactory," says Fracisca Van Haandel, a Norway-based teacher trainer with over ten years of teaching experience. Van Haandel has been working as a volunteer in Parikrma for the past year.

Handel (left) & Bagchi (right): accelerated learning and stability inputs

"Most Parikrma children are from dysfunctional families where they witness continuous violence and substance abuse by their parents. In some cases they also experience sexual abuse and other physical trauma. The objective of the mental health programme is to help them overcome their psychological traumas to enable them to absorb academic inputs. In our book emotional and mental stability is the prerequisite of good learning," says Suhrita Bagchi, head of Parikrma’s mental health programme, who adds that Parikrma is one among only three schools in Bangalore (others: Mallya Aditi International and George Foundation School) to offer a full-fledged mental health programme.

In sharp contrast to indifferent government and state board affiliated schools which totally ignore the reality that the overwhelming majority of slum children tend to be first generation learners with illiterate, poverty-stricken parents driven to alcoholism and domestic violence by wretched living conditions, Parikrma extends its education services beyond school walls to students’ homes through its community development service (CDS) programme. This programme is designed on the premise that to be able to impart quality education and ensure the child makes best use of this education by attending school regularly, it’s important to create a stable and nurturing environment at home. Parikrma’s CDS programme includes provision of healthcare education to parents with special focus on AIDS and TB prevention, alcohol de-addiction, family planning, hygiene, vocational training for older siblings and household income augmentation through women’s empowerment.

Samson with Parikrma parents: community relationships focus

The holistic Parikrma ‘Circle of Life’ model for educating under-served children, which includes a hands-on curriculum, nutrition, mental health and family care initiatives, is already showing results. Class attendance averages 98 percent with less than 1 percent dropping out. This compares well with government primary schools where 76 percent of students drop out before they reach class VIII. Consequently the Parikrma model is a ready-made blueprint for government and aided schools to adopt and apply. Last year the Parikrma team demonstrated that its model can work just as well in government-run schools. Given the challenge of improving the class X pass percentage of eight Bangalore Mahanagar Palike (BMP) or municipal schools by the BMP commissioner, a task force of 40 (including teachers) conducted an intensive four-month two hours per day tutorial programme for 875 children of 12 BMP schools. Subsequently their class X board exam pass rate leapt from 9 to 31 percent.

"To meet this challenge we hired retired municipal school teachers who knew the system well. A curriculum was drawn up and two hours of intensive lessons were given after school to 875 class X students of the 12 BMP schools. The Pratiksha Trust picked up the Rs.19 lakh bill for teachers’ salaries and Akshaya Patra, which provides mid-day meals to municipal schools, pitched in with a free meal for the children. The consequence of applying only a part of the Parikrma model was a 300 percent improvement in the class X board examination of these 12 schools last year," says Bose with evident satisfaction.

But although its integrated model of education is the major contri-buting factor behind Parikrma’s extraordinary 98 percent class attendance record — though the jury is still out on whether the foundation’s first batch of class X students will match the academic performance of frontline CISCE affiliated students three years hence — the other factor behind the quick success of the three Parikrma centres is rigorous application of corporate management principles to the foundation and schools’ backroom administrative operations. Parikrma perhaps is the first education NGO in the country to be professionally administered like a corporate on the basis of a business model with clearly defined targets and a marketing plan.

Srinivas (8), student of the Royal Parikrma Centre for Learning, Koramangla

This is an important factor in the sustainability of its operations because all Parikrma centres provide completely free tuition, uniforms, stationery, textbooks and nutritive meals and diet supplements to their 620 students. This requires an annual revenue mobilisation effort estimated at Rs.1.25 crore (Rs.15,000 per child) — not a small order in a society which accords low priority to quality education for the under-served. Therefore Parikrma’s marketing team is in constant contact with organisations, charitable trusts/ foundations and over 4,000 individuals who have signed up to donate half-a-day’s salary once every year towards building Parikrma’s corpus fund.

Raju & friends: strong brand equity

Yet perhaps the unique selling proposition of Parikrma is that within two years of its registration, it has begun — by all available indicators successfully — practising a common school system by giving children from the lowest strata of society the opportunity to receive qualitatively acceptable English medium school education — hitherto the preserve of the ruling class. This is a landmark achievement because children of the poor have always been crowded into shabby ill-equipped government schools staffed by indifferent teachers offering low quality education in regional or vernacular languages to the almost total exclusion of English language learning. This early childhood deficiency disqualifies them from the middle and higher rungs of the booming national jobs market where English fluency — written and spoken — is a non-negotiable prerequisite.

Parikrma football team

One of the most shameful and enduring injustices of post-independence India’s crumbling education system is the unwritten social contract of ‘education for the classes, literacy for the masses’. This intrinsically inegalitarian education model which has continuously restricted upward mobility of hundreds of millions of midnight’s children, condemning them to the status of hewers of wood and drawers of water, is being forthrightly challenged by the Parikrma school education model.

If Bose and her dedicated band of believers succeed in their mission — the era of effortless superiority of India’s acquisitive middle class will be over. The playing field will be leveled, and in the rapidly expanding national market for jobs, positions, power and perquisites the best man/ woman will win. Surely, that’s the way it should be.

With Srinidhi Raghavendra (Bangalore)