The Project Vidyā is implimented in the following steps. The progress made by Kanchana Foundation with the initiative is available at "Current Status".

• Beneficiary Identification
• Strategy Localization
• Project Implementation

Beneficiary Identification

At the end of this phase, to start with, a single beneficiary school is selected, which is at the lowest rung of the develepment. To identify such a school, the issues related to the core nodes, children, teachers and school are tabulated among the schools in Puttur. We have identified the main reasons that hinder the progress of education. The obstacles faced by the children to attend schools are:

• Monetary issues seem to be the prevalent reason that prevent many children from continuing their education. Though primary education (1st grade to 7th grade) is free in public schools, poverty compels parents to send their children to earn 'bread' for the family by engaging them in some revenue generating activities. Poverty to a certain extent influences the amount of study material that is affordable by the family.
• Gender inequality too has played its part in girls being taken out of schools at an early age.
• In India, education is compulsory for children only between 6 to 14 years, after which they may dropout of school. Hence as soon as they reach this age limit, children tend to forgo school for some petty income generating jobs such as working as a cleaner boy in gas stations, garages, restaurants etc and girls assisting in household chores.
• Lack of primary health care and nourishment has resulted in poor health of children, which essentially keeps them out of school.
• Apart from the main curriculum of education, extracurricular activities, sports, music etc are not present in many of the schools.
• Stimulating and encouraging incentives for children to pursue their education with scholarship, talent recognition activities are missing.
Thus the main solution in this case is to empower children and their parents so that they can continue attending the schools and get sound formal education.

The issues that prevent effective teaching are:

• One of the main reasons was the lack of sufficient number of teachers in schools. The teachers are allocated based on the total number of students in the entire school and not based on the number of students per class. Currently only one teacher is allocated for an average of 40 students in a school. This results in classes from 1 to 7 being handled by only 3-4 teachers and only less than 30 schools (only in the city) out of 279 public schools in Puttur have full teacher strength.
• Apart from quantitative issues, qualitative issues have also predominantly affected education, namely training and orientation for teachers in areas of teaching and in imparting education for children. Sports related training, personality development activities, extracurricular activities like music, sports etc are non- existent.

The issues that are faced by Schools are:

• Lack of basic infrastructure at the schools. There is a dearth of teaching rooms with many classes being taught in a single room, lack of sanitation, kitchen, articles of furniture, play ground, drinking water facility, garden etc.
• Lack of teaching and learning related aids, books, library, computers, lab equipments and modern science related teaching aid tools have also contributed to diminishing the quality of education.
• Many of the schools have also failed in organizing festivals, organizing sports and literary competitions that would encourage children and also the society at large to take part in the process of education.

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Strategy Localization

Kanchana Foundation localises the solutions to the above issues to suit the needs of the identified beneficiary schools. The conditions mentioned in the previous section need not necessarily be prevalent in all the schools. The structure, the nature and the manner of society-school interaction varies across schools. The strategies are negotiated by having a discussion with the school, village administration and the partner organizations to first establish a bridge between the entities and then devise action plans to successfully implement the agreed schemes. The general strategies to alleviate above issues are chalked out by Kanchana Foundation.

To solve issues that keep children away from schools, certain strategies are identified:

• A special project of sponsoring a child to foster further education is also proposed. A needy child (from age 10) is identified, a sponsorer donates annual sponsorship fund ( about Euro 500) till the child reaches age 15 (for a total of 5 years). Partial funds are released on an annual basis to support basic education. The entire funds would be released to that child after reaching an age of 15 in order to proceed with continued education.
• Support is to be provided through financial instruments for trouble free schooling and to achieve a 100% attendance. This could be in the form of scholarships, award of free text books, writing books, stationeries and school uniforms.
• Primary health care is to be ensured through conduct of free health checkups and medical facilities.
• In addition, the parents of the children have to be empowered that would further ensure that children are not kept away from school. Parents need to be advised through teachers and schools to discourage children from working.
• Illiterate parents are educated through talented beneficiary students during weekends.

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The Kanchana Foundation proposes following solutions to tackle the issues hindering the teaching conditions:

• Similar to sponsoring children, a teacher may also be sponsored with a salary of about Euro 500 per year. With this scheme the demand of teaching resource would be fulfilled along with an employment opportunity for unemployed candidate.
• Training the existing teachers in areas of computers and soft skills would also result in increasing the efficiency and quality of education imparted by them. This results in utilizing the existing resources to fulfill the needs of the school itself.
• To further augment the quality, the teaching activities can be monitored based on the results and feedback activities could be introduced. To encourage the teachers, a best teacher award and other promotional activities could be held in schools. Encouraging teachers in increasing their competences is very advantageous and sustainable. This is a form of utilizing the local resources to solve the local issues. As shown in the studies (Vijaya Sherry Chand, et al, "Teachers as Educational-Social Entrepreneurs: The Innovation-Social Entrepreneurship Spiral", Journal of Entrepreneurship, 2009), teachers themselves can be entrepreneurial in the activities that they carry. Given a conducive environment, with a need to create a social value, they show a higher degree of innovation and effectiveness in spreading the ideas and innovations across new contexts. Thus encouraging teachers would result in a sustained development of education in the schools.
• Kanchana Foundation also intends to introduce, an information technology enabled project, when necessary funds are available. The project is named 'e-Educate'. The core idea is to provide e-education facility in rural class rooms with a projector- PC- webcam- internet. A teacher from a distant school having enough resources would direct the class room activities. This enables class room distance teaching through resourceful partner schools. In the long run this is to be expanded to enable distance teaching through internet- with teachers and volunteers spread across the globe educating the needy schools. This not only provides valuable teaching resource but also provides an opportunity for the people to indulge in social service activities.

Kanchana Foundation believes that improving the conditions of schools is possbile by assisting with better infrastructure and establishing a bridge between the school and the society.

• The immediate infrastructural requirements (building, equipments, computers etc) are to be identified and solutions and facilities have to be offered.
• Latest information on training, extracurricular activities etc have to be provided for the school administration so that the teachers and hence children can take advantage of the information.
• Curriculum and teaching practices have to be improved continuously through extra trainings. Regular seminars, orientation programs, competitions for teachers and students have to be arranged in the schools. This would provide an intellectual frame work for schools.
• Arranging regular agriculture based seminars and education related activities for the village society increases cohesion between the school and the immediate society surrounding the school. In turn the society can lend their help in constructing school buildings, play grounds etc. These would increase the symbiotic relationship between the society and the school.

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Project Implementation

Kanchana Foundation impliments these development cycles by involving the local administration and the society surrounding it. The progress would be constantly monitored by taking few key performance indicators. For example improvements in student retention rate, increased quality of teaching, developments in the infrastructure etc. The strategies are constantly adapted to result in a sustained development. Once the school becomes self- reliant, the model is deployed in the next identified school.

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