Our Mission
Empower tribal children through education – Remove illiteracy in Rural India & Nepal
DID YOU KNOW
- Only 10% of tribal villages in India & Nepal have schools.
- Only 5-7% of tribal women and girls are literate.
- Saraswati Vidyalaya movement will bring education and primary health care to 100,000 rural & tribal villages.
- This movement focuses on education that is relevant to local needs, culture and traditions.
- The movement emphasises unity, harmony, community and character building.
- Currently there are 35,000 such schools functioning all over India & Nepal.
- United Kingdom target is 10,000 such schools by 2014 of which it has already reached 1,140 in Nepal.
Despite attaining freedom more than 50 years ago, large proportion of population of India & Nepal is still without basic literacy skills.
While the Indian Subcontinent is making great advances in software, space, and nuclear technologies, it still is paradoxically struggling with the challenge of achieving 100 per cent literacy. At the time of their independence, their literacy rate was only around 10 per cent and a great progress has been made since then.
However, around 70% of 130 million people still live in abject poverty because of lack of education. But for this, both India & Nepal would have achieved much greater heights and recognition as developed countries.
Therefore providing basic education to people remains a great challenge for these countries and for all of us, and as inheritors of the great cultural civilisation, we cannot deny our responsibility to eradicate illiteracy.
Our aim is to set up 100,000 One Teacher Schools (Saraswati Vidyalayas) in the remote tribal and rural villages of India & Nepal by the year 2014. This will cover nearly all the villages where no schools exist today. To date, we have established over 35,000 such schools in so many villages and tribal areas, of which UK has contributed 1,140 in Nepal.
