Bid to involve citizens in educating underprivileged children

In an initiative that makes Right to Education (RTE) Act more meaningful, a social organisation here has launched a campaign to enroll underprivileged children in municipal schools with involvement of citizens.
Citizens, who come across such children falling in the age group of 6-14, in their respective localities, streets, footpaths can report their deprivation to "Door Step School" (DDS), an NGO which has now launched a website for such a feedback in order to enable it to take practical steps aimed at getting the children registered for primary education.
"There are various reasons for an eligible child being deprived of his right to education. Apart from social aspects, even non-availability of a birth certificate can impede school admission process for the underprivileged segments," said Rajani Paranjpay, founder-president of DSS.

Elaborating on the "Every Child Counts" (ECC) campaign launched DSS, she said since it was not practical to survey each and every part of the city to detect non-school going children aged 6, the concept of a website for the purpose was evolved with technical inputs from Mumbai based Tata Institute of Social Sciences.
Any well meaning citizen can report where they had seen such children answering a couple of questions after accessing the website and with the Google map the area is notified to the DSS team of volunteers who visit the locality to identify the target segment and initiate school admission process with the nearby Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) school.

"Our focus is to target 6-year-olds for mainstream school admission for primary education", Paranjpay said, adding that the involvement of citizens in the project was encouraging.
The "Every Child Counts" campaign has issued an appeal to all Pune citizens to make use of the DSS website and make their own contribution to help children enroll in schools and make the RTE more relevant to the deprived population.