We are a team of 5 Gandhi fellows working with Municipal schools of Mumbai for the past one and a half years. The pandemic affected our work with the children and teachers to a large extent. Though schools are still closed, we are back at work and have started visiting the households and communities of the students. We have found that despite the best efforts of our teachers, the reach of online teaching to our government school children is not up to the mark. We observed that a lot of families do not own a smartphone. From the families that own a smartphone, a large number of students are irregular for school virtual engagements due to reasons like, overlapping of online class timings and parents work timings, online classes of siblings in different grades being conducted at the same time, and only one smartphone in the family, not enough data pack. To sum up, children in this academic year were not able to learn much and have not picked the desired reading level of the class they are in.In order to mediate this problem, we have identified space and people from each community who can take the responsibility for running the reading center.

However, the challenge we are facing now is the shortage of relevant, age-appropriate, children’s literature books in their mother tongue. To help them with the same, we have started this fundraising campaign.

These reading centers which will be established in 10 communities will help us reach out to 2654 children.

By supporting this reading center you will be able to support children in the following five areas;

1) They will get to read two new books per week that will inculcate a joy of lifelong reading in them, apart from the many other academic skills like comprehension, etc.

2) Their reading level will improve which will help them in understanding other subjects like maths, science, and social science.

3) The story and poem books we will provide will help the children develop their emotional and imaginative capacity which will further help them in their overall development.

4) We have noticed that if children from government schools don’t pick up reading in their early classes, they tend to drop out from schools after class 5th and 8th and discontinue their education. We want every student studying in our schools to atleast finish their graduation.

5) You will be helping someone to become the next Sundar Pichai, Satya Nandella and APJ Abdul Kalam. Yes, all of them had done their schooling from India.

The 60,000 rupees will be used to provide books to reading centres identified and set up by fellows in 10 communities of BMC schools.

Around 45-50 books will be provided to each reading centre along with a creative kit. (cost per centre would be INR 6000)

Please support us to help the children.