High drop out rates in municipal and government schools, and extremely poor performance of children prompted us to start our after school education support programme. Our main objective is to enhance school performance, contain drop out rates and ensure access to secondary school.Children coming from urban slums are unable to cope with their studies. This is often due to poor teaching conditions within the school, and lack of help from home as parents are often illiterate. Moreover children have no place to study, no access to books or tutors. The primary programme is by far the most important one as it is in these classes that most children drop out.

This is by far our leading project as it is one that was set up in toto by two of our 'empowered' teachers. Meet these women of substance and share some of their woes here. But the real reason for which this centre is close to our heart is because this part of Okhla does not have any primary school in the vicinity and hence most of the children do not go to school at all. Being a factory area, it has a substantial number of bad elements and illegal trafficking and the children are often used to perpetrate petty crime. Our presence was initially resented as we are pushing back children into school. However our effort has now been recognised and is finally appreciated.

This has encouraged us to extend this centre that has now become our primary flagship. We now have a brick and tin stucture in place of our plastic tent. Children moved from class to class and soon it became imperative to start a secondary section. A small computer centre was also added. Okhla also became the first choice for our focus on quality programme and we have begun daily spoken English classes for our primary children. Environment and other related issues are also part of the new curriculum and the children have even planted green plants in front of the school. No one would ever beleive that once upon a time this was a garbage dump! For more click HERE.

The new Govindpuri Primary Centre was opened in June 2010. It is located in a rented premise in Gali no 3, next to our main centre. One of the reasons for opening this primary centre was that our prep children needed support when they entered class 1! Though this is not exactly a slum, there has been an influx of migrants in the small rooms available on rent particularly after the raising of many slums in the wake of the Commonwealth Games. Many of these children go to the local teaching shops - English medium primary schools - that proliferate in every street. This means that they study in English medium and thus this centre also provides after school support for such children. We expect a large number of children as other tuition facilities in the area are quite costly. For more click HERE.

We run a small primary support centre in our Library. This was started because our librarian felt he had time on his hands. About 30 children study in this centre. For more click HERE.

The Sanjay Colony and Nehru Camp centres were closed in May 2010. Sanjay Colony was closed because of a sudden proliferation of NGOs in the area. Children were attracted by these new organisations that offered many freebies and we lost a large chunk of our kids. Rather than look for new children we felt that it would be better to concentrate our work in areas where we were needed and were we could hold on to children for a long time thus enabling us to make a difference.
Nehru Camp was closed because the landlord needed his rom and we were unable to find a new one in the vicinity. We also realised that there were many new NGOs in the area and that our work wa somehwat redundant.

The Sanjay Colony primary extension replaced our Giri nagar programme. It can be considered as our first step 2 project as Giri Nagar was closed because it was felt that parents had finally understood the role they had to play in the education of their children. Many were now sending their wards to private tuitions. Moreover the opening of two more NGOs made us redundant. We had to look for greener pastures or in our case to areas where children were need of help and parents needed to be motivated. Sanjay Colony began in July 2006 and within a month we had more than 80 students!It was closed in July 2010.

The Nehru Nagar extension camp was started in 2007 as part of our effort to increase our primary outreach. Situated in the heart of the Govindpuri slums it reaches out to over 70 children. The centre was closed in July 2010.