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In powerless Bihar village, a school
by innovation and Skype
In an under-construction school building in Chamanpura
village of Bihar’s Gopalganj district, children are learning algebra,
chemistry, Newton’s laws of motion. There’s no teacher in the classroom, no
blackboard. The teacher is hundreds of miles away, and he is teaching via
Skype. In this very unsual school, teachers mark their attendance using a
biometric fingerprinter, and students log their attendance in a computer.
The school is even
more unusual because Chamanpura has no electricity yet. The computers are
powered by two large generators. In an undeveloped corner of a state that has
long been synonymous with underdevelopment, is unfolding a story of remarkable
enterprise and innovation — in several ways, a microcosm of the turnaround of Bihar
itself.
The hero of the story
is 36-year-old Chandrakant Singh, who founded Chaitanya Gurukul Public School
to “provide world-class, technology-enabled education” to the children of
Chamanpura, the village in which he was born, and where he completed primary
school by the light of a kerosene lamp.
A merit scholarship
took Singh to DAV College in Siwan, and then to a B.Tech from BIT, Sindri, and
an M.Tech at IIT, Bombay. Then came a one-year stint at Tata Steel, followed by
three years at Bosch in Germany — and finally, his current job as an
R&D researcher for General Motors in Bangalore.
For a man of a
distinctly academic bent of mind — he got his first patent while in Germany —
it took, oddly, an incident of lumpen politics to fire Singh’s dream. Three
years ago, when Raj Thackeray’s MNS was attacking Bihari migrants in Mumbai,
Singh decided he needed to do something.
“I was greatly
disturbed, and wanted to arrest the migration of students from Bihar, in my
small way,” he said. The first instinct was to get in touch with the principal
of the primary government school in Chamanpura with an offer to fund six
students who would pass a scholarship test. But the principal never conducted
the test.
Singh then sought the
advice of Surya Narayan, dean of IIT, Bombay, who suggested that he make a
business plan for a revenue-generating, self-sustaining model instead of taking
the charity route. Singh then wrote a 100-page plan — a blueprint for a Rs
30-crore campus that would be completed over 10 years, including a school, an
engineering college and an R&D centre. He e-mailed the plan to 3,000
friends, eight of whom agreed to fund it. With these eight and himself, Singh
formed the Chaitnaya Gurukul Trust.
After the state
government approved the proposal, the trustees met the villagers of Chamanpura
and told them of the first step of the project — the Class I-VII Chaitanya
Public School. Within three months, they had 13 acres of land — from 100
villagers who sold plots from 3 decimals to an acre in size, at a price that
was 30 per cent above market rates.
The construction of
the school began in May 2009, and the generators — 15 KVA and 25 KVA — came
first. A year and a half later, the school has 45 rooms on two Wi-Fi-enabled
floors — 10 of which are classrooms, each with an LCD monitor or a projector,
the rest being offices, a library, a 17-machine computer lab with 24-hour
broadband Internet, and residential quarters for students and teachers.
There are four
volleyball courts, four badminton courts and a cricket pitch. A swimming pool
is under construction.
Teachers came from
across Bihar, through a competitive exam. Sixteen of them received two months
of training from teachers at Mount Carmel School and IIT professors at
Bangalore. They were taught how to use Powerpoint and Flash technology, and
given lessons in team-building and motivation.
Singh is himself on
the faculty, teaching residential students Math on weekends via Skype from
Bangalore. At a class attended by The Indian Express, he taught Class VI
students concepts of perimeter and area, with his voice running behind diagrams
and graphs on screen.
“Knowledge gained
through pictures and interaction stays longer,” said Singh. Several other
offsite trustees teach via Skype: Pankaj Kumar, a BIT, Sindri almunus, teaches
Physics from his home in Singrauli, MP, where he works with NTPC, and Sanjay
Rai, from BITS, Pilani, teaches Chemistry from Korwa, UP, where he works with
HAL.
The school’s first
session opened in April 2010 with 500 students, 10 per cent of the number of
applicants. The students came from all backgrounds — there is Om Prakash, son
of a rickshawpuller from neighbouring Hakam village, seven-year-old Rima, whose
father is an engineer in Chennai, and Harshita Kumar, the 10-year-old daughter
of a doctor in Ballia, UP.
But most students are
from 50 villages in Chhapra, Siwan and Gopalganj districts, many of them as far
as 15 km away from the school. The basic tuition fee is Rs 300 for Class I and
increases by Rs 100 for every class upward. Hostel residents are charged Rs
4,000 a month — but concessions are made depending on the income of the child’s
family, which the trustees ascertain themselves by travelling to their villages
and meeting their families.
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