Last December, 18-year-old Kanchana from Krishnagiri district was selected for a month’s assembly line training with Tata Electronics in Bengaluru after clearing her Class XII exams. The company has now offered her a job.

Sathyavathi K from Puliyarasi wanted to be a nurse, but her parents couldn’t afford the fees. This June she joined a degree course in nursing in Hosur.

Sixty students who completed their Class X exam this year were cleared to join Ashok Leyland’s apprenticeship programme – a two-year vocational education course at Hosur.

These stories, and hundreds more, have been scripted by Ashok Leyland’s Road to School (RTS) initiative. It aims to reach one million underserved students in government schools by 2025. Launched six years ago in 36 schools, RTS has grown to cover nearly 1,000 schools and 100,000 children.

The project began small in villages around Ashok Leyland’s Hosur and Ennore plants. Most of the government schools there had leaking roofs, crumbling walls, cracked blackboards, few teachers and often no working toilets or drinking water. When the project started, research showed 75% of the students were below average and 50% could not even identify letters. One third of the children did not attend school at all and the annual dropout rate was 35%.

RTS roped in Learning Links Foundation to design the curriculum and fix the crumbling infrastructure. Classrooms got brightly painted walls and fun posters. Toilets were re-furbished and RO drinking water made available. The children were offered breakfast in school. They got eye and dental check-ups and timely vaccination. Over the past six years, RTS has covered schools in Thali, Shoolagiri, Kelamangalam, Anchetty and Thagaty Natrampalayam in Krishnagiri district, Kolli Hills and Erumaipatti in Namakkal district, and Minjur and Puzhal in Tiruvallur district. Today, RTS has gone national, but its focus is still the children.

"RTS aims to bring in societal equity and inclusion through quality education especially in under-resourced communities. We have chosen to work in such communities close to our plants and office locations to enable employee volunteering as a key aspect of our people engagement philosophy. Our aim is to reach one million children by 2025," says N V Balachander, chief sustainability officer and president, communications, CSR & corporate affairs, Ashok Leyland.

The results are showing. In 153 villages, school enrolment was 100% in both 2019 and 2020. The primary and middle school (Class I-VIII) dropout rate nationally is nearly 15%, but in these villages it is 0%. Girl students’ dropout rate in these villages is 5% after Class X and 10% after Class XII, whereas nationally it is 22% and 40% respectively. While the national average for child labour is 4.6%, in these villages the percentile in 0%. These schools also showed 20%-30% improvement in both literacy and number skills and an 85% pass percentile in the Class X board exams.

What’s more, with 15% improvement in overall school ratings every year, the project saw more than 16,500 students reverse migrating from private schools to RTS institutions. And while the pandemic caused disruption in schooling countrywide, the project provided online education and community learning support and backed it up with practice workbooks on numbers and words, which were distributed to more than 50,000 students from 650-plus villages.

But beyond the data, what really works for the programme are the everyday success stories like those of Kanchana and Sathyavathi.

Courtesy: TOI.