Future of India depends upon the quality of education imparted to our children. We have 43,447 Government Primary Schools and 3,029 Government High Schools in the state of Karnataka. We believe that it is the joint responsibility of the Government and citizens to improve school education, to provide incentives like mid-day meals, improve school infrastructure including state of the art information technology to all the Government schools in our state.

Over 90% of the budget for School Education in Karnataka is spent on salaries to Government primary and secondary school teachers and as grant-in-aid to aided institutions, leaving very little for development of infrastructure in government schools. There are an estimated 2.5 million children who are not enrolled or dropped out from schools and, even as efforts are being made to bring them to school, the need for additional resources has been growing rapidly.

We have begun the process of transforming school education in Karnataka by the active involvement of donors, non-government organizations and corporate sectors through the “School Adoption Programme” which we launched at the beginning of last year. This paradigm shift in our activities has yielded satisfying results.

The education of the world’s children is high on the global agenda. In the context of Education For All (EFA), all children should receive free, good quality education. The reality is that millions of the world’s children are too poor to benefit from the declaration, unless there are special interventions that target their development. Unfortunately, such children do not form a special social category in poverty eradication intervention programmes. Thus, their inclusion in the achievement of EFA appears to be a hit-or-miss phenomenon.

Recognizing the central role of poverty eradication in wider global agenda and acknowledging the need to reach out to the poorest children with the objective to break the poverty cycle for them, Reaching Hand has embarked on a programme of education and poverty eradication.

The objective of the School Adoption Program (SAP) is to convert backward rural and urban government schools into model schools so that they are on par with the best run city schools in terms of infrastructure and academic performance with extracurricular activities.

In aligning with the objective, Reaching Hand has initiated this program by adopting a government higher primary school at Channasandra Urban Bangalore, with more than 100 students. The children are from the nearby area and belong to the daily laborers. Financial constraints prevent parents from opting to send their children to better schools. Reaching Hand has assisted by providing the students with free uniforms, shoes, textbooks, and stationary and has also constructed proper classrooms for the students, separate toilets for boys and girls, and drinking water facilities. This program has provided excellent results, as the attendance among students has improved, and the students are participating in all the activities more enthusiastically. Student dropout rates have reduced dramatically, and the school management is looking forward to more. Our long term objective is to better the overall standards of as many government schools as we can, bringing them on par with privately run schools.