Bharti Foundation, the philanthropic wing of Bharti Enterprises, was founded in 2000 to cater to nation's need for quality education. With this intent, the Foundation launched its flagship rural education initiative, the Satya Bharti School Program in 2006 to provide free quality education to underprivileged children in the villages, with special focus on the girl child and children from marginalized communities. The Foundation aims at holistic all-round development of children making them responsible and employable citizens of tomorrow and at creating a sustainable and scalable model of quality-education that can be replicated on a large scale by like-minded organizations, institutions and government.

The program envisions 500 Primary and 50 Senior Secondary Schools reaching out to over 200,000 children. As of September 2011, more than 33,000 children are enrolled across 250 Satya Bharti Schools (233 primary, 12 middle and five senior secondary schools) in six states India states (Haryana, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal). 48% of the students are girls and 0.5-1% of our children have learning disabilities. Catering to the marginalized sections, 76% of students and 47% of the teachers belong to the SC/ST/OBC communities.

Special Provisions

Quality education at Satya Bharti Schools is supplemented by schemes such as free mid-day meals (helps in improving enrollment and attendance of students) and free school uniforms, educational materials, games, etc.

Operating primarily in states with discouraging male-female ratio, the program focuses on maximum enrollment of girl children. Specially designed girl-child policy, separate toilets, one female teacher in each shift and sensitization campaigns encourage girl-student enrollment.

School Curriculum

The curriculum encompasses indoor and outdoor learning activities exposing students to a wide perspective of learning on all facets of life. We focus equally on the development of personal, social, physical and emotional skills of children.

Ensuring Quality

Student-learning levels and holistic development, stakeholder-connect and teacher effectiveness define quality education at our schools. Various Internal and External Audits are conducted to ensure effective implementation of processes.

Capacity Building

We seek to recruit local youth passionate about teaching and sensitive to children's and community needs. Our teachers undergo extensive and regular training on pedagogic and leadership skills to make them efficient disseminators of knowledge.

Community Involvement

The program is driven to reach out and include the community of students, parents and villagers. Community members have supported and contributed monetarily and otherwise towards the schools. During the Community Volunteering Week, schools are handed over to the community wherein villagers acquaint students with local culture.

The annual Community Development Campaigns are student initiatives to fight social evils in their villages thus emerging as agents-of-change and bringing about a positive social transformation.

Conclusion

The Satya Bharti School Program has consciously been implemented in rural areas which faces challenges like lack of quality-teachers, first-generation learners, poor infrastructure and vast geography and aims to find innovative solutions to address these thereby demonstrating a working model to impact the overall schooling-system. We have also sought partnerships with the government and like-minded organizations to take our program to each child in rural India.