Executive Summary: The importance of education in everyone’s life is a well-known fact. For any country to develop, it is essential for that country to have a robust education system. As Nelson Mandela said, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world”. Society Evils:-

• Gender Base Educational Structure 
• Female Foeticide & Infanticide
• Low Rural Literacy Rate

Rural Education and its Problems: According to the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), the number of students going to school in rural India is increasing. However, more than 50% of the students in the 5th standard are not capable of reading a textbook of the 2nd standard. Hence, instead of focusing on uplifting the literacy rates, it is time that we need to empower children with quality education and knowledge that can be applied in their real life.

• Lack of Availability of Resources
• Lack of Awareness of the Importance of Education
• Non Availability of Teachers
• Digital Dividend

Ways to Boost Rural Education: 

• Encourage Free/Aided Education
• Increase The Number of Schools
• By Adopting The Modern Teaching Technologies
• By Providing Proper Infrastructure & Resources

Education Disparities in India: How big is the menace?

• 67% of rural households in Punjab have at least one drug addict.
• A household survey conducted by the International Classification of Diseases of the UN (ICD) indicates there is at least one drug addict in 65% of families in Majha (comprising districts Amritsar, Gurdaspur, Tarn Taran) and Doaba regions (Jalandhar, Hoshiarpur, Kapurthala).
• 64% of families in the Malwa region (including Bathinda, Mansa, Muktsar, Patiala, and Sangrur districts) have one addict each.
• 3 out of 10 girls have abused one or the other drug.
• 66% of school students consume gutka or tobacco.
• Nearly 7 out of every ten college students abuse drugs in some form or the other.
• A key reason is the easy availability of drugs in Punjab.

Source: State government’s affidavit submitted to Punjab and Haryana high court in 2009

Project Overview:A Feasible Solution by The Kalgidhar Society Akal Academy is a chain of 129 co-educational English medium low-cost public schools following the CBSE curriculum and affiliated with the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) in the rural areas of Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. The students are mostly from the deprived sections of society, admitted regardless of caste, creed, region, religion and social status. Akal Academy, Baru Sahib believes in empowering young minds with value-based education, alongside exposing them to the best of educational pedagogy.

Educate To Save - An Initiative For Deprived Rural Kids:

Educate To Save (ETS) is an ancillary initiative of The Kalgidhar Society – Baru Sahib to draw support for children of impoverished families who are deprived of education Irrespective of religion, caste, creed, race, ethnicity or gender. As of now our schools across the country provide free/aided education to 28052 deprived children of rural areas under several scholarship schemes and out of this around 5500 kids fall under the Educate To Save program. This also includes the 1777 rural underprivileged children that we have added in the existing academic session under free/aided category.

ETS Vision: Our vision is to bring cost-effective yet quality-oriented holistic schooling to rural & underprivileged children in India.

ETS Mission: To bring FREE values-based education to 1 lakh needy out-of-school kids at village cluster levels in the next 5 years.

The Goal of the Project: Education is considered a vital element in the development of a society, a system, and a country.

The main objective of the ‘Educate To Save’ (ETS) program is to create a positive and enduring change in the lives of rural underprivileged children by providing them with quality & value-based education systems. We have a firm belief that an adequate education system can lead them to many positive outcomes, such as an improved ability to understand policies, procedures, rights, duties, government schemes, legislation, available benefits, and protection laws.

• We are achieving the United Nation’s SDG goal 4 ‘Quality Education’ via this project.
• We are also achieving the United Nation’s SDG goal 5 ‘Gender Equality’ via this project. 

“Via ETS, we aim to bring FREE/AIDED value-based education to 1 lakh needy out- of-school kids at village cluster levels in the next 5 years.”

Need Assessment:

We all know the power of education but unfortunately, we also know that education is not provided equally across the nation. According to the NSO survey of 2018, rural areas recorded a 73.5% literacy rate whereas urban areas recorded an 87.7% literacy rate. There is a gap of 14.2% which indicates that there is an acute need to generate more options to reduce this gap for rural kids across India. Considering the facts and need, The Kalgidhar Society initiated; Educate To Save (ETS) project which entirely focuses on uplifting rural deprived kids from the villages of 5 Northern States, which can be best achieved by providing subsidized or free education opportunities to the deprived section of our society.  Our approach is integrated with programmes designed to enroll needy underprivileged rural kids to embed them with Value-Based Education System. Annual Fee Structure of Akal Academies:

• Primary Classes (Nursery-Vth) 29807
• Secondary Classes(VIth-Xth) 34760
• Higher Secondary(XIth-XIIth) 41833
• Sponsorship Amount under ETS Program 29957

Targeted Beneficiaries: with their Family Occupation

• 40714-Farming / Agriculture and Dairy Work
• 7996- Daily Wagers / Maintenance Workers
• 4336- Small & Mid Level Jobs
• 2033- Army(Working-Retired)
• 1905-Self Employed/Business
• 1707-Priest/ Granthi
• 1026- Teachers in Government & Private Schools
• 1949- Single /Handicaped Parent/Orphan Students
• 804-Working in Abroad/NRI
• 712-Class–A Jobs
• 64166 Overall Student Strength

• Free Education For Deprived: We genuinely believe that lack of education is a crucial challenge preventing youth from accessing growth opportunities, by ETS program, we aim to use education as a weapon to break the barriers of poverty. We provide free school level education to both girls and boys and we are also providing higher education at no cost to young females and help them transform their life.
• Holistic Education: The program brings together a holistic learning curriculum that teaches students to reflect on their actions and how they affect the global and local communities and how to learn from the community around them. Our primary focus is on modern education with the strong support of the spiritual aura. To provide excellent English proficiency and life skills to empower rural youth to become future-ready. 
• Learnings and Sustainability: For the last three decades, the organization has been carrying the projects on Individual donations. Our NGO has taken loans to serve humanity and empower the rural and exhausted sectors. Apart from this, the Government of India introduced the Emergency Credit Line Guarantee Scheme (ECLGS) to support NGOs like us. Under this scheme, we got two loans worth 2.50 cr and 3.90 cr to overcome the overhead running expenses in similar charity projects during the Covid-19 pandemic. “The Kalgidhar Society” was awarded United Nations Development Programme’s SDGCC supported SDG Action Award for achieving sustainable development goals by the Punjab Planning Department on 28 September 2020. As stated earlier, we have 129 Academies covering 6450 villages across the five northern states of India, i.e., Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh & Rajasthan. We are following a unique concept of Self-Sustainable Schools wherein we provide the infrastructure, curriculum, trained teachers & systems in our schools.  We have 27 academies up to 8th standard, 69 academies up to 10th standard and 34 academies up to 12th standard. We keep on adding new classes to rising schools, and it creates an ongoing need for qualified teaching and non-teaching staff; we fulfill this from our women empowerment project.

Project benefits:

• Each year, around 1500-2000  Students from rural low & middle-income categories with around 30% of them being from SC/ST/OBC categories, will get free of cost accommodation during their academic tenure.
• Another 15000+ underprivileged students will pass out higher secondary education in a decade with this program.
• Rural Talent will be retained in rural areas.
• Sharpen scientific skills in basic, primary and secondary education to the rural children
• Approximately 1300+ parents have socio-economic benefits every year.
• Generation of direct employment for hundreds through suppliers, construction workers, guards, gardeners, transport and allied services for schools.
• Leverage cost-effective technologies to disseminate innovative, high-impact learning tools and methods
• Inspiring local community to move away from Drugs and Alcohol abuse
• The educated students are becoming employable, and wage earners for their families positively impact the local area's GDP and the Indian economy.
• Create a bank of employable and educated youth that contributes to the economic health of the nation.
• The rural students should be able to explore finer aspects of Science and the subtle issues of human values in the same breath.
• Through educated youth, enough awareness of the perils of rampant use of pesticides/fertilizers can be spread.With educated persons in the community, enough change can be catalyzed in the society towards health, social and economic issues.
• Every educated girl can change the DNA of the immediate 3 families that she lives within.
• Rural students give back to society after achieving their goals.

Other measures adopted by The Kalgidhar Society

• Applying Innovative Teaching Methods: Many institutes in urban areas have adopted newer teaching techniques; however, it is not that easy to implement in rural zones. We have adopted concept learning in our institutes to develop students holistically; we also organize webinars and physical sessions to enhance students’ abilities. We have developed an online learning system collaborating with Amazon Web Services to provide online education and assessments.
• Provide Adequate Infrastructure for Rural Institutes: If we have to lay the foundation of solid educational life, it must start with no delays; and It can only be done with the optimum infrastructure for rural educational institutes. We provide competent science labs, Language and ICT labs, libraries, digital classrooms, boarding & lodging and mess for all the students.
• Promoting Computer & Web-Based Literacy: Though our country is progressing technologically, there is a digital gap between urban and rural areas. To fill this gap, we adopted the latest practices. During the Covid pandemic, we collaborated with AWS (Amazon Web Services); it is one of the most significant collaborations with a cloud service provider like Amazon under the rural empowerment initiative by the society. 
• Embedding Values Along With Scientific/Modern Education: Value based education is the core of Akal Academies. Intellectual development has to be blended with self-actualization and divine consciousness so as to embark on the journey of leaving this world as a better place. We, at Akal Academy, Baru Sahib believe in empowering young minds with value based education, alongside exposing them to the best of educational pedagogy.