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History

The Pratham movement was launched in Mumbai in 1994. The initiative was taken jointly by Dr. Madhav Chavan & Ms. Farida Lambey, the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai and UNICEF. A national network of Pratham-like initiatives was set up to expand the programmes in different parts of the country. In 1999-2000 Pratham spread to other cities including Delhi, Vadodara, Ahmedabad, Patna, Pune, Allahabad and Bangalore. Today, Pratham is an all India movement. Moreover, it is one of the largest non-profit organizations working in the primary education sector.

Pratham Delhi Education Initiative (PDEI) was launched by Mr. Vinod Khanna, a former member of Indian Foreign Service during the summer of 1999. Mr. Khanna was supported in his effort by Pratham Mumbai and a small group of volunteers from varied backgrounds in Delhi. The ICICI Ltd. and the HPS Foundation (a development support organization set up by HCL Perot Systems) extended generous support to this initiative.

Programme

Mr. Khanna along with some of his colleagues toured Trilokpuri, a resettlement colony in East Delhi, and found large number of children having no access to preschool education. PDEI thus launched its programme with 11 Balwadis in this area during August 1999.

A more detailed survey of entire Trilokpuri area in January 2000 indicated that about 60% of children in the age group 3-5 were not attending any kind of preschool activity, confirming the need for a large number of Balwadis (preschool programme). Therefore, number of Balwadis were set up and gradually scaled up in succeeding years reaching a maximum of 848 units (enrolling 16635 children in 3-5 years age group during 2007-08) spreading to other parts of Delhi.

The same survey further revealed that nearly 20% of school going children (5-11 years of age) were out of school. Most of them had never been to school. Thus, PDEI started 34 Bridge classes in March 2000 for out-of-school children which peaked to 818 units enrolling 18072 in 2004. Informal methods of teaching were used to motivate children to come to the class regularly. Classes were gradually structured to prepare them for enrollment into formal schools. PDEI launched its first summer camp in 17 MCD schools during May-June 2000, which was a preparatory class for out of school children. These children were mainstreamed when the schools reopened in July 2000 followed by the launch of Balsakhi programme in 18 Municipal Primary Schools of Delhi, all in South Shahdara. This increased to 1357 Balsakhis in about 700 schools during 2004. Balsakhi was a community volunteer engaged in PDEI’s programme and was placed in Municipal Schools to provide retention support to newly mainstreamed out of school children.

During these years, the programmes and strategies have evolved in response to changing environment of elementary education in Delhi and emergence of new issues. Pratham Delhi have had large scale preschool programme in communities running Balwadi classes with the help of community volunteers and in community settings for several years. In 2008, PDEI entered into collaboration with the Department of Women and Child Development, Government of NCT Delhi to conduct preschool activities in Anganwadi centers of two project areas- Nand Nagri and Trilokpuri. This collaboration increases the outreach of PDEI’s preschool programme and at the same time brings more convergence with the existing government scheme.

Similarly, the Bridge Class programme of PDEI was operational between 2000 to 2004. Again, from the convergence and increase of outreach point of view, PDEI joined the Directorate of Education, Government of NCT Delhi led Univeralisation of Elementary Education Programme under Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan in August 2003. In this programme, PDEI set up 48 Learning centers for out of school children, enrolling about 2500 children, in District North East of Delhi. The project was functional till July 2006.

Child laborers were a very prominent category under out of school children and the usual bridge class model was inadequate to bring them into mainstream education net. PDEI thus launched its Balshramik programme in areas like Shashi garden and Chilla in South Shahdara in 2001. The areas added to this list subsequently were Janata Colony and Chouhan Banger in North Shahdara, Azadpur market and Nabi Karim in central Delhi. Though PDEI joined the INDUS project led by the Department of Labour, Government of NCT Delhi by setting up 12 Transitory Education Camp for about 600 working children in November 2006, the Balshramik programme ran concurrent in other areas till March 2007. The INDUS project came to an end in Delhi in October 2008. 

For retention support, PDEI launched Balsakhi programme in MCD Schools in 2000. Balsakhi was a young girl from the community who is familiar with the children of her neighborhood. She was placed in the school after getting the approval of MCD where she would work with newly enrolled children in school who required help. In 2002, PDEI launched a pilot project on “Accelerated Reading Pedagogy (ARP)” under the leadership of Prof. Jallauddin, a reputed literacy expert. During next one year, both the pilot project as well as different initiatives in the field, an approach was developed which help children learn to read within 30-40 days. Balsakhis used this approach extensively with thousands of children who could not read despite getting regularly promoted to higher primary class on the basis of attendance. PDEI used this approach in schools between 2003 to 2005. However, it was realized the school setting is not offering the opportunity to realize the true potential of this approach. Thus, PDEI decided to wind up this approach in schools and launch a community based planning and intervention model referred to as “Basti Model”. With MCD schools, PDEI maintained two levels of engagement:

• First, transfer of accelerated reading pedagogy to schools teachers through regular training sessions in order to have multiplier effect. Between June 2004 to March 2005 about 2000 MCD teachers were trained on ARP by PDEI trainers.
• Setting up Libraries in MCD Schools (the schools already have the provision of library but it was non-functional in most of the cases).   

The engagement with the MCD schools from 2005 onwards has been within the ambit of School based Library programme. The programme itself has evolved in the last four years both in terms of its outreach as well as its content. In Bastis, the effort to change the reading profile of the area was undertaken through Learn to Read (L2R) classes, a community based variant of reading classes through Balsakhis in schools.

Organisation

First meeting of the newly constituted board of Pratham Delhi Trust was held on March 25, 2000 at Narula’s Hotel, Connaught Place. It was chaired by Mr. Vinod Khanna and was attended by Mr. Lalit Narula, Ms. Brinda Singh, Mr. Vinay Shankar, Mr. P.P Chauhan, Dr. Venita Kaul, Mr. B.G. Varghese; Ms. Ramni Narula was represented by Mr. Sandeep Bakshi. Ms. Manju Bharatram, Dr. R. Govinda and Mr. Shahid Mahdi had also given their consent to join the Trust and it was decided that all the Trustees shall reassemble on April 22, 2000 at the same place to sign the Trust deed. Thus, Mr. Vinod Khanna was designated as the first Managing Trustee and Mr. Lalit Narula the first Treasurer of Pratham Delhi Education Initiative Trust.

The first full Executive group consisting of Mr. Vishal Sehgal, Mr. Saurabh Johri, Ms. Maninder Kaur, Ms. Namita Gupta and Ms. Mary Biswas attended the third meeting of the PDEI Trust held for the first time at its registered office, provided by ICICI bank, at NBCC Place, Bhishma Pitamah Marg, New Delhi on September 26, 2000. The meeting was chaired by Prof. R. Govinda.

Thus during last 8 years, the board has met 29 times. At present the board consists of 10 Trustees.