Premji Foundation to set up schools

To have at least one demonstration school in every district.

The Azim Premji Foundation, a not-for-profit entity promoted by Wipro Chairman Azim Premji, will work to improve elementary education at the grassroots level across the country. The foundation, which is funded by Premji in his personal capacity, plans to set up at least one school in every district to provide quality education at a reasonable price.

This is the first time that the foundation plans to become directly involved in primary education, while it continues to help strengthen the education system in partnership with state governments.

“The plan is either to set up schools and manage them or explore the possibility of managing government-owned schools. We hope the first set of schools will be operational from the next academic year,” Dileep Ranjekar, co-CEO of the Azim Premji Foundation, told Business Standard.

To start with, the foundation will establish demonstration schools wherever it launches its “district learning and development centres”. It immediately plans to launch such centres in districts of Chhattisgarh, Karnataka, Puducherry, Rajasthan and Uttarakhand, before going pan-India.

These schools will offer classes starting from kindergarten to Class 12. The curriculum will either follow the education board of the respective states or CBSE.

“Our demonstration schools will provide us the required experience and credibility to work with the larger system. The attempt will be to design the curriculum, teaching, learning and assessment processes to help achieve the objectives in the National Policy for Education — such as developing an ability to think independently, empathy, sensitivity to others, scientific temper and attributes that promote social and national cohesiveness,” added Ranjekar.

Ever since it was founded in 2001, the foundation’s primary focus has been elementary education in rural areas. It works with various government agencies like district institutes of education and training, district education office clusters and block resource offices to improve the quality of education. So far, the foundation has worked with over 25,000 schools involving over 2.5 million children.

In Bangalore, the Azim Premji Foundation runs two schools in partnership with real estate developers for children of migrant labourers.

Recently, Premji transferred 213 million equity shares from his holding in the company to a trust that will act as the financing body. A part of this corpus, which is valued at Rs 8,846 crore, is expected to be used to set up the schools.

The Foundation has also received approval from the Karnataka government to set up a Azim Premji University in the state. To be operational in 2011, it will offer multidisciplinary courses, including education policy, teaching and learning, education psychology, educational leadership and management and educational technology, among others.

Meanwhile, West Bengal information technology minister Debesh Das said: “The Azim Premji Foundation will extend technological support to secondary schools in the state. The foundation will help provide technological teaching tools such as computers, CDs and projectors.”

Premji was in Kolkata for a Reserve Bank of India board meeting. Besides providing technological aid to secondary schools, the foundation will also help train teachers for engineering colleges in the state.

“The Foundation is set to scale up aid operations in West Bengal. Premji spoke about a first-of-its-kind initiative, wherein his foundation would train teachers for engineering colleges, helping to provide more employable pass-outs,” Das added.

(With inputs from Kolkata bureau)