‘Education on wheels’ programme bridging educational divides

Meet Braja Kishore Pradhan, CEO of Aahwahan Foundation. Bengaluru-based Aahwahan Foundation has launched an ‘Education on wheels’ programme to bridge the educational divide in rural Karnataka. Aim is to prepare children in middle, high school and college for examinations like NEET, UGC etc.

Excerpts from an interview with Braja Kishor Pradhan

1. How did you come up with the unique idea of Education on Wheels?

Education on Wheels stemmed from the need of pandemic induced lack of knowledge base mainly for the underprivileged children. The Education on Wheels programme before it was formally launched in Jan 2023 had a few trials to understand what is that these students needed and how we can ensure their continuance of education mainly for girls, who drop out relatively early from the education system.

Our vans, currently 3 in number, move from government schools to villages where these children stay and ensure the education system reaches their doorsteps.

Currently we work with 208 govt schools across Karnataka and have worked with more than 5000+ students. Our vans are fully equipped with high end tools required for robotics lab, biology lab, chemistry lab, physics and maths lab. We have a fully functional digital library also in place which has more than 13000 books and study materials and we are constantly working on upgrading it.

We have 6 permanent faculty in these vans and 4 volunteers while 11 others are part time associated with different educational institutes. We have our own designed education material for these children but we also have taken material from Byju's, Vedantu etc to upgrade the children.We move to schools and villages as per our time table schedule. We devote 3 days for one village and approx 3 hrs time. Our aim is to prepare children in middle, high school and college for examinations like NEET, UGC etc. Having said that we also understand the importance of personality development courses and soft skill training, which we also provide to these students.

2. What did you realize during lockdown, how the children from underprivileged communities faced challenges towards their education?

There were many challenges the children from the underprivileged section faced like unable to go to school which also led to some children dropping out of the education system, lack of internet and books facility which greatly hampered their education and also affected their preparation for higher studies.

These children's parents were unable to pay for their books etc as most of them were workers and lost their jobs. We understood we had to do something to get these children back to the education system. Therefore, we felt if we reached out and provided them education at their doorsteps that would get them back to the system.

3. How do you intend to take forward the initiative of Education on Wheels?

With our patron like Infinera who believed in our work and supported the cause we were able to launch 3 vans. We believe this is not enough and we can do more not just in Karnataka but the rest of the country too. Therefore, our aim by the end of 2023 to take the capacity of vans to 10 and in due course reach out to the country as well. For this we are actively looking for support from other such organisations.

Besides this based on more students' suggestions we would like to incorporate more such courses that would be beneficial to them in the long run.

4. What are your future plans with regards to education for children from underprivileged communities?

In the past we launched Computer on Wheels based on its trial and success we were able to launch Education on Wheels a full fledged well equipped science classroom. Besides this during lockdown we also launched a scheme for such children called Laptop Bank which enabled us to loan laptops with internet enabled to help them study, research, fill entrance exam forms and other such exercises. This initiative was a big success as it helped a lot of students with their daily and other educational requirements.