Asha for Education

<ul>
<li>To enroll every child of each of the six island village into such school of joyful learning.
<li>To reduce and finally eliminate the school dropouts by trying to provide an alternative to the drudgery and poor staffing and accommodation of the Govt Schools.
<li>To save children from being trapped as labor in the trades of prawn collection, forest produce collection and agriculture.
</ul>

<h3>Updates</h3>
<ul>
<li>Proposal received by Berkeley, 2000 for building school and other expenses.
<li>Proposal forwarded to Seattle. Total funding was $13,700 (about RS. 6,40,000). Recurring part was RS 3,02,528.
<li>Check was send in Aug-Sept 2001. So the recurring money from that funding covers them till Aug-Sept 2002.
After this Susanta Giri proposed three new projects including Children's resource center. These proposals are available in the yahoogroups files section. None of these projects were championed by anybody.
<li>Site visits conducted by Sanjib in Dec 2001 and Anirban Hazra in July 2001.
<li>Need arises for more money for filling in construction deficit. Berkeley funds $1200 and Cornell funds $1800. Check sent in Aug 2002.
<li>Funding proposal for second year received in Aug 2002.
Project submitted for General funds. Later pulled out at it does not correspond to any of project-types intended for General funds.
<li>September 2002 : Asha stars are identified. Anirban Hazra, Sanjiv Dutta, Maya Yajnik and Anirban Dasgupta are the Asha Stars for this project.
<li>September 2002 : Project presented at St-Louis, Cornell
<li>Nov 2002 : Cornell allocates $3000. Check sent in December.
<li>Site visit by Anirban Dasgupta and Sharmistha Majumdar.
<li>2003 : St-Louis approves $2800. Check sent in April.
<li>2003 : Berkeley approves $2000. Check sent in May.
</ul>

The Baikanthapur Tarun Sangha came in existence in 1982. Their initiation to social work happened during the 1982 floods in the Sunderban area. The current project is based in Kultali block of the Sunderban area. The six villages involved in the project are the following:
Baikanthapur North and South
Ambikanagar
Kishorimohanpur
Binodpur
Nagenabad
In addition to other activities, BTS runs a school in Baikunthapur.