The Children’s Lovecastles Trust (CLT India) was an idea envisioned by Bhagya Rangachar in 1997 when she saw children building mud castles outside her apartment; children who should have been studying at school were assisting their parents in a construction site to earn their daily bread. It all began with a mid-day meal scheme in a government school in Karnataka and gradually morphed into something bigger. Lack of teachers is a reality in this country and rural areas suffer the most in this respect.
Once the Karnataka government decided to take up the mid-day meal scheme on its shoulders, CLT decided to shift its priorities towards the improvement of the quality of education for underprivileged children in semi-urban and rural areas.
CLT decided to invest in developing content for STEM (Science, Technology, English and Mathematics) subjects for grades 5th to 10th. It was also decided that to solve the question of teacher shortages, it was necessary to bring in technology into the picture. Empowered with technology and the necessary training required to navigate through it, teachers and students were introduced to the idea of e-learning and smart, interactive classes.
e-Patashale is the initiative to bridge the digital divide, a low-cost and user-friendly tech-based intervention. It has been designed to empower teachers with a rich pedagogy thereby making the teaching process of STEM subjects easy and accessible to many. To keep things simple, the model uses a plug-and-play device that is connected to a TV or a projector to deliver the content. Internet connection is not mandatory, which ensures that it can reach places where the Internet still hasn’t. This model has reached close to 10,000 classrooms, impacting one million students across the country. Keeping in mind the needs of curricula, CLT has designed all of their content in adherence to the NCERT syllabus which is similar to the state board syllabus. At present, the content is available in English,Hindi and Kannada. Marathi is the fourth language in which the content will eventually be rolled out.
Over the years, CLT has developed an expertise in what it has been doing and has envisioned a goal of taking its content and pedagogy over multiple platforms to 10 million learners by 2021. In order to achieve this, partnerships and large scale global philanthropy will be required. The organisation has partnered with companies like CISCO, Intel and Microsoft Research in the past to bring in village community development, government school developments, and adoptions among many other things. Any kind of individual or collective support will strengthen us to carry our mission forward and change the educational landscape of the country.
Why should a corporate partner with us?
“Our source of pride and greatest reward is to put a smile on the face of a newly-engaged, connected, and empowered child,” says founder Bhagya Rangachar. CLT India brings a shift in the country’s educational sector, especially in rural areas. Children are the citizens of tomorrow and this means that children from all social and economic backgrounds will have to be equally empowered to face the challenges of tomorrow. With the expertise that we have gathered over the years, we want to provide the opportunity to children who perhaps do not have the means to attain the same.
In this process, we have generated impact and this will go down as our legacy. The kind of engagement we have had with teachers and students have shown us that change has been possible and that a lot more needs to be done. “This method of teaching using videos helps the students to visualize and understand concepts effectively. Science topics (e.g. cells and micro-organism) can be taught in an interesting manner”, says Mahadevi Melangavi, a teacher in Belgavi, Karnataka.
“Before we got a smart class in school, it was very difficult to understand science concepts. But now after we got it, it's easy to remember as it’s all in pictorial representation”, says a student who was taught under the e-Patashala programme.
CLT India has also made a mandatory clause to see to it that there is transparency in all its actions. We have gone through many levels of due-diligence from teams such as Charities Aid Foundation, Guide Star, FICCI etc. and has won the Transparency Certification. Our team has been trained to make sure efficiency and transparency is guaranteed in terms of documentation and the reporting mechanism that has been built around each initiative.
Special Features of the Organization
CLT, over the 21 years of its operations serving the education sector, has developed a complete understanding and expertise in development, delivery and analytics in its field. CLT’s work has reached over 3500 schools, benefitting over 1 million students.
CLT’s program has evolved as one of the strongest digital STEM content solutions available today, completely device agnostic - it can run over any device* of the user’s choice, and serve him or her in the native language.
By employing data analytics, it is possible to monitor the performance of the app in real time and to help gauge usage patterns and deliver remote upgrades. This also enables us to do any kind of troubleshooting, if the need arises, remotely. Furthermore, we hope that as time passes by information gathered in this fashion will make us understand the progress that an individual school has been able to achieve over a period of time.
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