Project Education for All

The whole of yesterday there were various pre-wedding functions. I skipped

all of them and attended the musical-cum-dinner function in the evening. Heavy showers forced the function to be shifted to a banquet in Hotel J W Marriott from the Royal Phuket Marina.

Met so many known faces from Kolkata – P R Agarwal,   Rajendra Bachawat, B G Bangur, H P Budhia, Ravindra Chamaria, R S Goenka, Sudhir Jalan, Sushil Mohta, Suresh Neotia, Arun Poddar, S K Todi and many others. I chatted up with Rajendra Bachawat about one of my projects Education for All. He sponsors four students every year under the project and has been doing so for many years. I started this project in the year 2000 to provide scholarships to the underprivileged students of our society. When I started, it was the only-of-its-kind project in the country that gave scholarships on the basis of need and not on the basis of marks or merit.
With the help of friends and wellwishers the Project has not only taken off in four or five years but also become quite large in its scale of operations. It was formally launched by the then Governor of Rajasthan, Pratibha Patil, (picture) along with author Taslima Nasreen, Kapila Vatsyayan, Trustee IIC and director of UNIC India and Shalini Dewan at a function at the Raj Bhawan in Rajasthan. 

I also started a monthly kit distribution programme under this project in which the children from one basti or needy area got educational kits containing exercise books, stationery, basic language learning books and toys. We used to do this distribution program once a month roping in some celebrity or socially eminent person (picture: Agnimitra Paul). 

In a short span about 12,000 children benefited from this program. Thereafter, I started Project Muskan under Education for All. We collected old clothes and rejected toys from well-to-do households and distributed them among small needy children.

In the past four years I was unable to give much time to this project due to my other commitments. However, from the last two months, I am working on this project. I personally feel that lack of basic education is the root of all ills - from unemployment to crime – that
ail our society.
I have nurtured this Project since inception and am planning to give it a new impetus by involving Prasenjit Chatterjee as we share common views on the matter. We’ve had some meetings and have also met with some college students on the matter.

Let me see how things shape up.

ess bee