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Work Completed and in Progress
After nine years devoted to school construction, to the establishment of schemes for apprenticeships and help in health and hygiene matters, we wish to continue our development along this same way. Additionally we wish to promote a better balanced family planning policy in the villages as well as develop a rural economy with a proper social infrastructure. Our engagement should help to make families increasingly independent enabling them to take charge of their children’s education on their own. Four new schools, in Bihar and Rajasthan, saw the light of day in 2006 and seven new projects are underway in India. Elsewhere, by 2009 we aim to extend our support to the children of Madagascar, the African country in the Indian Ocean.
In Rajasthan. Beginning in 2006, the school in Rataria Ki Dhani, in the Thar Desert, 50 kilometres from Jaisalmer, opened its doors to some hundred children. This was our first experience in this region. Shortly afterwards, in April, we inaugurated, for the same number of students, a second school in the region, in Gala Ki Dhani, another desert village. To be able to welcome more children, we are building at this moment a second building for the children of Gala.
In Bihar. From 2002 we are operating three village’s schools in Itra, Baiju Bigha and Nain Bigha. Our fourth school in the district of Gaya started its activities in April 2006 in the village of Haridaspur, situated about ten kilometres from Bodhgaya. Its name is Nilamati and we can now offer a regular education to 350 new children from four small villages surrounding Haridaspur.
In Rajasthan. We have started to put in place a “Follow up” support programme in favour of children in need in the town of Jaisalmer. We will utilise the building of an existing school which has been placed at our disposal. This programme, which takes place between the end of the afternoon and the evening, aims to support children living in difficult conditions. While these children may be attending the official school, they have no access to a suitable place to do their homework and their parents are illiterate. This support programme will enable them to pursue a regular school curriculum, thanks to the infrastructure we are able to offer them. This new programme began at the end of 2006.
In Bihar. During 2006 we started to develop our first bank for micro-credit in the district of Gaya (see “Local Economy and Development”). This project aims to organise a savings scheme allowing families, with the support of mothers, to take advantage of loans for the acquisition of means of production for family needs. The ultimate aim is to improve their living standard and to produce the resources needed for the education of their children. Until now, the mothers of families from six villages surrounding Haridaspur are in the process of organising themselves. They are saving up each week and have already begun to distribute tens of loans for micro-family enterprises. From our side, we guarantee the complementary funds needed to encourage and reinforce the communal finances and, in return, we require the villages to progressively take charge of the school for their children. The school must become “theirs”. We expect to extend this project progressively to the villages of Bihar, West Bengal and Rajasthan.
In Bihar. We have started to extend the Camijuli school, inaugurated in January 2002, into the village of Aitra, in the district of Gaya. At the end of 2006, we were constructing another building of class-rooms as well as a dispensary and a home for handicapped children from the numerous surrounding villages. Within this Camijuli expansion, we plan on establishing a market-place with shops for seeds, cereals, vegetables, fish and general grocery products for the benefit of families from these villages. This project should offer better services to the farming community, who till now have to travel several kilometres for basic services, and should generate a surplus which will be used to cover the operating expenses of the school.
In Bihar. In Bodhgaya where we have our regional office we have been operating for over one year a training centre for artisans and textile workers. This centre, named Rudraksha, offers training to develop the skills needed in the textile industry – sewing, embroidery, clothing manufacture – as well as for the various handicrafts and local production. The main beneficiaries are young girls and mothers from the villages close-by. Our first workshop for textiles and handicrafts has been operating for a few months. We intend to increase the output to generate a surplus for the operating of our schools.
In Bengal. In Calcutta we are operating, under our banner “Ecoles de la Terre”, three schools, Jhaldarmath, Jhilmill and Shantospur, three slum’s in Kolkata City. In Sunderbans Islands we are running three other schools, Ganga Sagar, Prahalad Dey and Shree Satya Raidigi. On another part, we have been supporting 4 schools managed by a Bengali institution “C.R.D.S. since 1997. They include the school in the Shanty-town of Kidderpur in Calcutta, and three schools in the Sunderbans in the Ganges Gulf, Chatua, Bhubaneswari and Siksha Niketan, all three located on different islands. In parallel, for all these schools, we are developing a better performing common programme of medical aid.
In Delhi. The first assembly of our new national organisation took place in November 2005. With a view to gaining official recognition as a national organisation (NGO), we undertook to rationalise our operations and opened discussions with the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Delhi. We will maintain our name and each state in which we work will be represented within the national organisation in the capital, Delhi. We will thus become “Schools of the World India” and will be free to operate in each Indian state without each time having to make a separate legal registration locally. We expect to obtain the necessary authorisation from the government in Delhi early in 2007.
A project in Madagascar. We made our exploratory visit in March and April 2006 with the aim of evaluating the needs of children on this island. We visited the southern region and found a situation which, if not worse than, was at least as poor as that we encounter in India. We expect to make a second visit in order to undertake our first project, the opening of our first school for the most impoverished children in this country.
LAST NEWS
In 2008 we have opened two new schools : Saraswati Shishu Niketan’s school in Pachhatti village, near Bodhgaya, in Bihar and Sunbeans’s school in Garfoorbattha village, near Jaisalmer, in Rajasthan.
At present we are waiting the final registration by the “Home Affairs Department” in Delhi. After that “Ecoles de la Terre” will get the national NGO status. Till now we are registered specifically in the different States, Bihar, West Bengal and Rajasthan. Our goal is to develop, on a national level, all our programmes we have introduced; that is to say :
- school programme,
- vocational training programme,
- medical programme,
- earning education programme (micro credit) and
- water programme (new)
Specifically we want lead to the autonomy of the population we are supporting. That is the main objective for the next ten years. Why? We don’t accept the syndrome of the dependence.