Education truly liberates

That which truly liberates is education “Sa Vidya Ya Vimuktaye!”

“For every child a fair chance” - UNICEF pokhramafoundation.org

Changing disadvantaged lives

Pokhrama Foundation is a non-profit committed to providing outstanding education in remote rural areas of India suffering from underdevelopment. The Foundation has worked in the field of education in Pokhrama, District Lakhisarai, Bihar since 2016. In its early years it offered a scholarship placing selected students in the best schools in and around Pokhrama. By 2019 ruing the lack of an outstanding school in the area, the Foundation decided to start one of its own.

Pokhrama Foundation Academy The Pokhrama Foundation Academy (PFA) began in 2019 from temporary premises and caters to students till Grade 8 and adds a new grade every year. The model underscores personal nurturing and mentoring where success depends on small class sizes guided by highly motivated and trained teachers. The PFA follows a broad curriculum including performing and visual arts, computer programming and physical education along with academic disciplines. The aim of education is to give students the skills and confidence to stand proudly in the world. Hence, the motto: “sa vidya ya vimuktaye” (That Which Truly Liberates is Education).

In 2020, Pokhrama Foundation acquired seven acres of land to build a spacious, simple, and state-of-the-art campus for its Academy. The construction of the campus is currently underway.

The school is envisioned as environmentally sustainable with zero carbon footprint. Water harvesting, solar energy and spatial designs to mitigate temperature extremes are key features of the plan.

78.2% of our students are first generation learners; 33.3% have seen extreme violence in their lives; 42% come from a background of grave poverty; 33.2% are from single parent households; and 100% of them suffer the ills of regional underdevelopment.

The PFA is marked by the absence of any kind of fear. Abhayadanam, “the gift of fearlessness”, belongs with all members — students, teachers and non-teaching staff. Members of PFA are encouraged to be “selfgoverning” and respectful of all.

Students are encouraged to express themselves freely.

Our Inspiration: The indomitable spirit of kids S, a 12 year old, tinkers with thrown out wires, tin cans and other “waste” to make crude electronic items. He plays cricket, excels at dramatics, and dreams of being an engineer one day. All this despite the extreme violence he has seen.

10 year old Su., sits and reads for hours in the noisiest of settings. She can translate with facility Harry Potter into Hindi and Safdar Hashmi into English. She wants to be a professor when she grows up.

SK is 11 years old and the son of a domestic worker and daily wage labourer mother-father duo. He taught himself to write English by painstakingly copying a page of English text every day. His great ambition was to get to go to school one day. Now a student at PFA, SK excels at school and aims to be a scientist in the future.

These kids face poverty, violence and discrimination every day, but refuse to be defined by it.

Pokhrama Foundation resolves to take its educational blueprint to other parts of our vast country. We plan to open several schools. And we wish to connect our educational work in communities to interventions in health and sanitation.

Pokhrama Foundation: Learning Centre Pokhrama Foundation launched its Learning Centre on 6 December 2021. All of Pokhrama and its hinterland suffer from regional backwardness and widespread poverty. But even within Pokhrama, there are many degrees of disadvantage. The Learning Centre works to level the playing field for the most deprived children of the area. It specially reaches out to girl children who receive few, if at all any resources for their growth in a patriarchy-ridden society. It also mobilizes kids from the lowest castes from families where education is an alien concept. It offers bridge courses that prepare students for transition into the formal learning environment of a school. Seventeen student volunteers from PFA (Grades 7 and 8), who received teaching practice and training, teach 51 kids (ages 6-9) drawn from the local community. Sixty percent of the Centre’s students are girls, a majority from the lowest castes.

Pokhrama Foundation’s Core Team and Founding Members Dr. Anil Sethi Anil is CEO of the Pokhrama Foundation. A Ph.D. from Cambridge, UK, he wears two hats: that of historian and educationist.

He has helped develop NCERT textbooks and has imparted training to hundreds of education professionals the world over.

Ajay Singh Ajay is the founder and CEO of Slayback Pharma. An alumnus of Delhi University and IIM Bangalore, Ajay was awarded the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of The Year 2018 Award in the Life Sciences category in New Jersey, USA. Garima Gaur Garima is a social development professional. She has worked with the United Nations Volunteers (India), CRY (India) and Barnardos (UK). She has a Masters in Social Policy from the London School of Economics.

Dr. Nishtha G. Singh Nishtha is an educator and an academic.

She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University, USA. She has taught and researched at colleges and universities in India, USA and the UK. Swati Sinha Swati is a Supreme Court lawyer in Delhi.

She specializes in bilateral investments, treaty disputes and international commercial arbitration.

Gyan Ranjan Gyan is an engineer and an MBA from London Business School, UK. He has worked in the pharma and banking industries across India, Japan, Hongkong, the UK and the US.

Pokhrama Foundation Academy map

Give the gift of education by donating funds: • To build our school campus • To sponsor a few children or a whole class

Village Pokhrama, P.O. Kajra, District Lakhisarai, Bihar Tel: +91 8287160727, +91 9686088552 Email: reachout@pokhramafoundation.org

ISHTIHAAR

Contact: Swati Modi, Tel: +91 94915 14034 swati@pokhramafoundation.org