ASHA: Akanksha: report in TOI-Mumbai (fwd)

[Subramanya Sastry <sastry@cs.wisc.edu>]

From: Arnab Bhattacharya <arnab@fbh-berlin.de>
Subject: Akanksha : report in TOI-Mumbai
To: asha@cs.wisc.edu
Date: Sun, 2 May 99 16:40:51 METDST

This should be interesting to ASHA-folk.
-Arnab

----------------------------------------
http://www.timesofindia.com/today/02mbom9.htm


 [Home]           [Metropolis]                         [The Times of India]
                                                        Sunday 2 May 1999
                                 [Mumbai] Mumbai                       [Image]  [The Economic Times]

                               They make space for them to fulfil aspiration
 Crossword
 * Java Version                By Namita Devidayal
 * Image
                               MUMBAI: For those who insist that there are no
                               easy answers to Mumbai's space crunch, here's an
                               inspiring story: By six every evening, the
                               employees of Highlight, an ad-film company, clear
                               out of their Altamount road office. At 6.30, the
                               office is filled with street children, a teacher
                               and a couple of volunteers from Akanksha, an
                               education project for slum children. Over the
                               next two hours, the kids are given a nourishing
                               drink, a hot snack and a dose of Maths, English
                               and `values'.

                               The next morning, it is business as usual at the
                               office, while the kids are back to selling gajras
                               and balloons, and dodging cars under the Kemps
                               Corner flyover. Something, however, is changing
                               in both these spaces.

                               ``We had decided long back that a part of our
                               profits will go towards a cause we believe in,''
                               says Highlight producer Srila Chatterjee. ``We
                               started by supporting Akanksha financially, but
                               at some point I felt that money was not enough.
                               So we asked if they wanted our office space after
                               hours.''

                               The Akanksha-Highlight school, started this
                               January, is the most recent experiment in a
                               unique project that has built on resources from
                               all quarters. The basement of the Nehru
                               planetarium, a classroom in a private Fort
                               school, a barrack at King George Memorial
                               hospital, and other unlikely spaces have become
                               temporary havens for more than 800 slum children
                               in the city. It is where they spend two hours
                               every day, learning about personal hygiene,
                               listening to stories, having fun and, as
                               Akanksha's founder Shaheen Kumar puts it, ``just
                               getting away from the slum environment.''

                               Akanksha, which means `aspiration', is a
                               charitable organisation which seeks to educate
                               underprivileged children. Through a mixed
                               curriculum of formal and creative learning, the
                               project helps these children to get integrated
                               into the school system as well as to pick up a
                               vocational skill. A grateful parent, Ramachandra
                               Kamble, who lives in a Mahalaxmi slum says
                               emotionally, ``If my daughters relied only on the
                               municipal school for their education, they would
                               not even be able to read a clockface. It is
                               thanks to the time they spend at Akanksha that I
                               feel secure about their future.''

                               It was barely eight years ago that Ms Kumar, then
                               20, nurtured a dream. ``I could barely speak
                               Hindi at the time,'' she says with a smile, ``but
                               I had this urge to go into our neighbouring
                               slums, to chat with the people living there, to
                               find out what their problems were.''

                               They would bring up the usual issues--water
                               shortage, housing problem--things over which she
                               had no control. But what did come up again and
                               again was education. ``Most of the kids were not
                               in school or had dropped out, either to work, or
                               because a teacher was beating them,'' she
                               recalls.

                               Barely aware of what they were setting out to do,
                               she and a couple of classmates from St. Xavier's
                               College recruited 10 kids from the Ambedkar Nagar
                               slum at Cuffe Parade, and embarked on a search
                               for space for their first `batch'. They tapped
                               schools and colleges in the area, but their
                               knocks fell on unresponsive ears. Finally, they
                               met Fr Ivo D'Souza, then principal of Holy Name
                               school, who offered a classroom. Akanksha was
                               born.

                               Over the years, an idealistic, collegiate
                               ``extra-curricular'' has metamorphosed into a
                               remarkable professional organisation,
                               self-sustaining, and no longer dependent on a
                               single person's dream. By 1996, Akanksha had
                               hired its first professional teacher. Enrolment
                               suddenly started spiralling upwards, from 300 in
                               1996 to 830 this year. Today, the organisation
                               works with a corpus of nearly Rs 90 lakhs,
                               employs 30 teachers and draws more than 300
                               volunteers--from college kids to housewives--to
                               its 14 centres spread across south and
                               south-central Mumbai. A full-time education
                               consultant rotates between the centres to monitor
                               the curriculum, hold teacher meetings and bring
                               in new ideas.

                               ``It hasn't been easy to get this far,'' says the
                               soft-spoken Ms Kumar, citing regular attendance
                               as a big problem. Yet, more and more parents like
                               the Kambles are recognising the value of the
                               programme, a fact the centre reinforces by
                               holding parent-teacher meetings.

                               Akanksha hopes to replicate its centres across
                               the city and is currently working on a
                               feasibility study of where to go next. However,
                               lack of space continues to be an ongoing problem.
                               The latest crisis, for example, is that the
                               building that houses a centre at Forgette Street
                               is being pulled down, leaving 60 children in the
                               lurch.

                               Long used to the classroom crunch, the Akanksha
                               team is ready with its real estate begging bowl,
                               hoping that yet another right-thinking individual
                               or corporate will come forward.

                               Which is why, they could not believe their luck
                               when, earlier this year, Highlight approached
                               them rather than the other way around. And if
                               Highlight's enthusiastic proprietor, Ms
                               Chatterjee, has her way, this is not about a
                               one-off thing. ``Who knows, by the end of the
                               year, we may have created a prototype which other
 [Previous]                    firms can follow, to start sharing their space
                               with the underprivileged. In any case,'' she
 [Next]                        adds, ``our philosophy here is that if you are
                               working beyond six, you are not overworked, just
 [Top]                         inefficient.''