Shilpa Phadnis, TNN | Oct 20, 2013, 04.13 AM IST
BANGALORE: No teachers, no teaching aids, chipped walls, classrooms in a state of disrepair and despair. Seventeen-year-old Nischal Nadhamuni saw how broken Bangalore's government schools were, saw the stark contrast they presented with the school he was privileged to go to. And decided to do something about it.
Nischal is using technology to make government schools in Bangalore work better. The 12th grade student at Mallya Aditi International School has developed a crowd-funding platform called School Works that donors around the world can use to make contributions to these schools. And it offers opportunities for people to volunteer to help the schools.
Nischal has begun by mapping 18 government schools in Bangalore East. The site provides each school's activity calendar and some of its requirements. "Many schools I visited needed help with stationery, teachers' aids and sports equipment. This triggered the idea of designing donor funding kits that would be useful to schools," Nischal says.
The kits are available in multiple categories including students' stationery, teachers' stationery, notebooks, cricket and football kits, water purifier and portable lights. The donations can be as low as $6 (Rs 315) for a football; and it can go up to $45 (Rs 2,695) for a water purifier. The stationery and notebook kits are less than $20 each.
Nischal has partnered with Open India Foundation, an education-focused NGO, and San Francisco-based Indians for Collective Action to offer tax breaks to India and US based donors and manage the payment processing. "The students in these schools might have to go through a lot of struggles every day, but they are brimming with enthusiasm," Nischal says. The initiative has collected $500 in the last two months.
Nischal made headlines last year when he scored 100 per cent in SAT, the most widely used college admission test in the US. He received a SAT score of 2,400 out of 2,400 in his first attempt, making him one of the few worldwide to have scored full marks.
Before he ventured into SchoolWorks, Nischal studied the District Information System for Education (DISE), a government database with over 1.3 million records of the various government schools all over the country. "I started work on SchoolWorks in 2011. I had grand plans, but realized soon that I was biting more than I could chew. I made mistakes and learnt from them," he admits.
Nishcal's initial idea was to use Aadhaar to track the effectiveness of the midday meal scheme. The idea presumably came to him because his father Srikanth Nadhamuni had played a leading role in UIDAI (the organization that provides Aadhaar numbers). But that project did not take off. "I wanted to have a biometric kiosk in schools to track the effectiveness of midday meals. I even thought of having video conferencing equipment in schools to connect volunteer tutors in the US to teach these students. I realized the complexity of Aadhaar and decided it would be better to do something else," he says.
Nischal started coding in HTML, Javascript, PHP, Java, and MySQL in his ninth grade. "These languages implement the features that were necessary for SchoolWorks," he says. He enhanced his coding skills in Java by taking up the Advanced Placement Computer Science course and test. All this came handy when he interned at the MIT Computer Science department, where he developed and implemented algorithms.
Nischal wants to expand his volunteer circle from the current 18. "I am spreading the word through social media," he says.
He attributes his social awareness to the weekly classes in socially useful productive work (SUPW) in Mallya Aditi. "We go to a government school in Yelahanka to teach spoken English. We also visited a school for children of Sri Lankan refugees in the city to understand their requirements," he says.
"I think people should volunteer in areas they are comfortable in. It helps people who are not as privileged as you. Many of my friends are volunteering to make a difference and their tribe will only grow," he says.
He wants to pursue an engineering degree in computer science in Stanford University or MIT. "The competition to get into one of them will be tough. So I have other options too," he says. "I don't plan too far into the future. If I come across a cool idea, I could even turn an entrepreneur."
He has ten months to work out how he will keep his donor platform, SchoolWorks, going if he heads abroad for studies. "I want to keep it alive at any cost," he says.
