PUNE: The Pune Municipal Corporation’s school board has set up a corporate social responsibility (CSR) wing to coordinate with the CSR cells of IT and automobile industries to involve them in civic schools.
Civic officials said the cell will help procure educational material for students from corporate houses in cash or kind. The school board runs 307 schools – 220 Marathi, 34 Urdu, 51 English and 2 Kannada medium schools for nearly one lakh students, mostly from poor families.
The civic administration spends Rs 20 crore provides food, uniforms, textbooks, notebooks, shoes, school bags and other educational material to students. “A city based non-governmental organization ‘Shyamchi Aai’, will work with the school board. It will help coordinate with other CSR groups in the city. Some companies will provide the material directly, while others will give funds to implement some projects,” said Shivaji Daundkar, education officer of PMC. The CSR wing will have a dedicated office which will be established at the office of the school board or in any centrally-located PMC school, he added.
Shyamchi Aai derives its name from the eponymous book of the same name written by author and freedom fighter Sane Guruji, whose niece Sudhatai Bodhe and actor Madhav Vaze are on the foundation’s advisory board. “The project’s intention is to increase public private partnership in the education sector. As part of the project, a ‘need analysis survey’ will be done in all PMC schools,” said Sheetal Bapat, founder of the NGO. She added that the survey will try and identify needs of all schools on gender issues, school infrastructure, grounds, sports facility, classroom development, health issues of students / teachers and personality development of students.
“The group is developing a website. Once the website and survey are completed, the findings will be uploaded on the website to specify the needs of the schools to the corporate houses,” she said.
[THE TIMES OF INDIA]
