Articles of public interest, covering most current social issues, mostly for rural areas . Could keep us informed of various personal initiatives and social issues from rural India. Also some very good Op-Ed pieces.

http://indiatogether.org/2005/aug/ash-people.htm

Pratham: Pratham is one of the largest NGOs in India focussed on primary education. It was started by two college professors in Mumbai in 1994 and currently runs schools, libraries and training centers in 14 states across the country. Pratham's grand vision is to ensure universal primary education to all citizens by the year 2010.

There are two very interesting facts about Pratham, which make it a unique case in point. The first is its "capital-light" approach to building community services like education. How can we make full use of underutilized resources to provide cheap and accessible education to all citizens? Pratham's main finding is that building infrastructure from scratch for a purpose like primary education is scarecely required---a lot can be achieved simply from donations. Today, most of Pratham's schools and libraries are housed in private homes, community centers, municipal school premises (donated by Governments) and in some cases, even open spaces in the villages. Partnerships with corporate houses like ICICI and Hindustan Petroleum has helped Pratham acquire technical equipment (like computers), office space, and, sometimes, even staff (salaried by the corporate's payroll), all for free! This has turned out to be an extremely cost-effective approach to education (the cost Pratham incurs for educating every child is less than $10 per annum!) and has scaled rather efficiently (currently, Pratham is involved in educating over 200,000 children in the country).

The second interesting aspect of Pratham is its innovative approach to staff hiring and training. Pratham recruits its teachers primarily from outside the mainstream workforce---unmarried young women or housewives with a fair bit of education but without any job. Apparently, there is a huge amount of talent left untapped in this section of the Indian population and Pratham has harnessed it effectively in creating thousands of social workers working full-time on primary education. Pratham builds a sense of community and empowerment amongst its staff---every preschool teacher views her class almost as a start-up venture, since she is likely to have started it and designed its activities herself. There are various teams of qualified personnel, some provided by corporate partners, involved in conducting teacher training sessions and for evaluating teachers at every stage. One curious feature of the organization is that job vacancies are never listed---departing teachers always manage to find and train replacements before leaving! When did you hear of organizations with such a high level of employee loyalty before?

Pratham is yet another example of how decentralized models of organization can be made to work, provided an appropriate mechanism for controlling their quality is put in place. (In Pratham's case, this consists of the variety of teacher training and "inspiring-the-community" activities.) The founders of Pratham believe that the key to learning, especially preschool learning, is the interaction between teacher and student and the organization's main focus is on creating a workforce that imbibes this idea deeply.

Today, Pratham is using its network of schools to administer health and nutrition programs for poor children and to educate ruralfolk on information technology. No new infrastructure is constructed or acquired; the staff is simply "re-trained" to conduct all these other activities, alongside their regular occupation as a teacher. A school thus begins to play a bigger role than it was initially envisaged to. This is an excellent example for other NGOs to learn how an existing distribution system can be effectively leveraged to provide more services at minimal incremental cost.

Pratham's feats have been lauded with a host of awards and recognitions, some of which are listed on their website. For a deeper analysis of Pratham's organizational merits read the attached report prepared by McKinsey & Company. (Much of the above material was borrowed from this report.)