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US return techie breathes new life in Karnataka government schools.
Girish Mudigere is on an unusual mission to revive Government Schools. He has dedicated his past five-and-a-half years to ‘Develop School’ where he is tirelessly working on improving the standard of education in government schools and thus preventing their closure.
Girish Mudigere is on an unusual mission to revive Government Schools. His project 'Develop Schools' seems like a swim against a swelling tide of shutting government schools. Just this June the state government decreed the closure of 2,959 of its schools. These schools were mostly Kannada-medium ones and with a very poor attendance of less than 10 students.
With over 16 years of work experience with Tata Technologies, Girish has also been in the US for six-and-a-half years. He has dedicated his past five-and-a-half years to ‘Develop School’ where he is tirelessly working on improving the standard of education in government schools and thus preventing their closure.
He is not alone in his endeavour for he administers a group of 350 people on a WhatsApp group which is buzzing with discussions. His network also consists of more than 350 teachers from the state and about 4,000 people from across the globe who help in implementing strategies drawn by group across the state.
Hailing from Mudigere and having studied for 2 years at the Mudigere Government School, he paid the school a visit to interact with the staff. His next stop was the Gokulam Government Higher Primary School in Mysuru as it is his wife’s hometown. He then added 8 government schools from his residential area, the Jeevan Bima Nagar in Bengaluru.
Girish shared that he observed that if there was need for volunteers there existed a supply too. All it needed was organising, streamlining and channelising resources. His project doesn’t accept even a single rupee or even any kind of material.
"We look for volunteers who can teach or donate and in this way; we connect the needy with the donor and also see to it that not a single rupee is misused. The process is transparent. We also ensure that the donated material is in working condition and being properly used. It could be a chair or a computer. We are looking at various levels of volunteering. We would need someone to fix electrical gadgets in the school, beautify it and so on. We are only asking people for 30 minutes of their time, probably in a week," he went on.
‘Develop Schools’ is already connected with 50 schools across the state while Girish continues to closely monitor the 10 schools he initially took up. One each in Mudigere and Mysuru besides the 8 in his locality.
Yogish Kasargod, Poornima Dutta, Narasimha Prabhu, Chaya Chandrakant and Sunitha HM form the core team members of ‘Develop Schools’. Social media has helped Girish garner a strong network. The project website www.developschools.org already has and continues to build a repository of high school textbooks, maths tutorials besides a special segment on Tulu and Urdu. "We want this website to be universal. We would like to upload notes of all languages," he added.
The state has about 1.25 lakh government institutions at the lower education level including anganwadis.
* Read the original story by Deepthi Sanjiv on www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com