'Shift focus to long-term edu solutions, imparting of skills'

Girl child dropouts are not just an education issue but a deep-rooted socio-economic crisis demanding multi-departmental collaboration. A dropout, panellists at ‘Education: Micro Learning, Macro Impact: Bridging the Learning Gap’ session warned, increases the risk of child marriage, teenage pregnancy, poor maternal health, and entrenched poverty. The discussion focused on how to scale grassroots learning innovations . “We have to shift from one-year, single-domain projects to multi-year, multi-domain, transformation-driven collaborations,” said Manmohan Singh of Kaivalya Education Foundation.

Rema Mohan of NSE Foundation, emphasized contextual flexibility, “A headmaster in Karnataka might not need the same thing as one in Nagaland.” Venkat Krishnan N of India Welfare Trust, asked “How do we support the enablers rather than just individual actors?”

Dr Gayathri Vasudevan of Sambhav Foundation pointed to the value of ‘bottom-up feedback’ while Rucha Pande of Mantra4Change, said that the most effective models of school improvement emerge when schools are seen not as units of delivery but as units of change.

At a session on ‘Education: An Enabler of Growth and Change,’ Abdul Salam KP, vice chairman, Malabar Gold & Diamonds said the group’s educational initiatives started well before the Indian govt enacted the CSR law. “Later when we began our free food programme for children during Covid, we found several kids did not go to school at all. We then launched informal classrooms at these food distribution sites, which gradually helped integrate them into formal education,” he said.

HAL’s D Vijay Kumar spoke of its success in tribal areas of Koraput, Odisha, with a female student having secured a job with a private company. Kumar Anurag Pratap advised students to avoid the beaten path of Class X-XII education and seek new employment-based skills. Ketan Deshpande said his institute provides free career guidance to youth from underprivileged backgrounds.