Shukla Bose and her team are trying to accomplish big things in India.
They are tackling poverty in India by providing extremely impoverished children top-notch education at no cost. Parikrma accepts slum children into their schools whose parents make less than $30 per month and provides them with an education from age 5 until they get their first job out of college.
But, that’s not where their innovative Parikrma Model ends. Their model provides both top-notch education in the classroom as well as a 360-degree program out of the classroom, including nutrition, health care and family care.
For instance, they provide their students with breakfast, lunch and a protein shake before going home every day. I’ve actually tried both their lunch and after-school protein shakes and they’re both tasty.
They also provide immunizations and health check-ups to students and provide de-addiction programs and microfinance to parents. These are just a couple examples of their 360-degree program.
Why the out-of-the-classroom program? Because classroom performance and success is affected by outside elements just as much as inside elements. You can read more about the out-of-the-classroom elements here.
The team at Parikrma understand that knowledge and education are the two most important factors in overcoming extreme poverty. That is why Shukla Bose who at one time was India’s highest-paid female CEO dropped her highly lucrative real estate career and focused on creating an education model that would provide a sustainable and scalable model for India’s bad school systems.
How bad are the school systems in India? Here are some quick stats pulled from Parikrma’s site:
Drop out rates are close to 50% by class V and 70% by the time the child reaches class VII. Attendance is as low as 15%. The curriculum is sub-standard. Teachers are poorly trained and teaching methods are outdated.
I got to do some work with Parikrma when I was Bangalore in 2006 and she told me that the unofficial motto for India’s school systems was, “Literacy for masses, education for the classes”.
Parikrma first opened its doors to slum children in 2003. They’re currently operating four schools in Bangalore. Since Parikrma is a nonprofit each of the schools has a sponsor to cover operational costs, including Yahoo!, Adobe and Levi Strauss & Co. You can see more of their various sponsors, like Dell, here.
It didn’t take long before Parikrma’s schools starting getting recognition for educational excellence and national testing performance and their athletic teams start beating local schools at soccer and track.
Their track athletes from their schools just won 13 medals (3 gold, 5 silver and 5 bronze) at the KPMG Inter-School Athletics Meet with more than 4,000 athletes from over 140 mainstream schools.
They’ve decided that operating four schools is optimal while they build out a sustainable and scalable model. In the future, they plan to put Parikrma schools in major cities around India and let them serve as hub-and-spoke models for local public and private schools
Parikrma could easily raise funds to build tons of Parikrma schools all over the place, but they want to focus on partnering with public schools and private schools helping them implement the Parikrma model.
You can check out their site for more info. They love volunteers, so if you have a cool idea give them a holler or check out their volunteer page here.
