Week 4: Vacation

VACATION TIME!

Yes,this is a very exciting post for me.I've got to do some very cool things during our 4 day vacation. So basically the 14 of us split into different groups and headed our separate ways.One group headed to Andhra Pradesh, which is north of Bangalore, Karnataka and the other group headed to Kerala, which is south of Karnataka.

Logically speaking, I should have gone to Kerala and visit my half Keralite roots there(my father is a Malayalee. Hence, I have a Nair as my last name). Instead, I decided to visit the SVYM organization in Mysore, Karnataka. Mysore is about 2 hours away from Bangalore but we were planning to visit the tribal school, which took an additional 2 hours.We stopped at a kamat, a restaurant at the roadside and saw many, many monkeys.

Masala dosa. Dosa wrapped around seasoned potatoes.

This is called gulab jamun.It's an Indian dessert made of milk flour and deep fried.It is then  added into syrup to sweeten it. This is the best Indian dessert hands down.

Baby monkey!

After having breakfast, we continued our journey to Mysore.We had a really pleasant driver who showed us the countryside of Mysore since he is from Mysore. Here are some pictures.

Our first stop was Viveka Tribal School. This school was specially built for tribal school children. Education here is done a little differently. Instead of following the mainstream, 1st to 12th standard, the students here are categorized by their abilities in class. The children were very excited to see us and it was nice talking to them and answering all their questions.We were shown around,and I was surprised to discover that this school is equipped with a Biology and Chemistry lab, and it's very much like our labs in the Malaysian high schools.Students here have shown improvement in terms of their SSLC pass percentage, something this school prides upon.

Our tour guide's Innova

Then, we visited the Kenchanahalli Hospital, where a combination of allopathy and ayurveda is used to aid patient recovery. Read more about this approach here Integrating Different Forms of Medicine to Lower Cost. Also,be sure to read the rest of my classmates' thoughts on social entreprenurship on the Global SE Blog.

Then we visited the SVYM Hospital is Sargur. This is a 90 bedded hospital with multiple specialty.Patients who cannot be treated in the Kenchanahalli will be sent to this Sargur hospital.We also had the opportunity to meet Dr. Bala, who is the CEO of the SVYM organization.He was very humble and he told us that SVYM have had many failures but it did have some sucesses and the sucesses are what we see now. He also was frank with us when he told us that the founder of PremaVidya, Mr. Naresh Bala is ill with leukemia and they are trying to multiple medical opinions before they decide to do anything.

The next day, we visited the Mysore Maharaja Palace and the St.Philomena's Church.I was forced to pay 200 rupees since I was a foreigner while Indians only had to pay 50 rupees.Bloody unfair.Anyhow,the palace was extremely beautiful except for the annoyingly rude officers.I think I don't do well under authority.Oh well!

St.Philomena Church

The statue of Mysore Maharaja(King of the Mysore)

Entrance of the palace

Mysore Maharaja Palace

Two tigers protecting the garden

Me and my friend

Our North Indian lunch

Week 4:Our Project

So.PremaVidya(PV), the organization that I am currently working with is scaling from 200 schools to almost 500 schools next year and will be impacting more than 100,000 students in the state of Karnataka. PV has been doing an amazing job by monitoring the progress level of each student until now. They intend to to retain the quality while scaling, a dilemma any organization will face.


So, we were given a set of different goals by PV which included three big questions:

How do we scale while maintaining quality?


How is PV going to show that they are actually creating an impact?


How is PV going to monitor rural schools and rural students?


These are really ambitious goals. With the help of Professor Moledina, we refined our question and decided to stick with one question. Basically the question was "What kind of data do we use to show that PV is creating an impact?"


We know that the SSLC pass percentage is increasing when PV intervened in schools. What we don't know is how or why the SSLC pass percentages are increasing. There could be a number of factors affecting this, and we intend to show that PV is actually contributing to the rise in SSLC pass percentages.However, we are lacking time and we realize this. 


So how do we get the data that we need? We thought that surveys would be a good starting point. Our professors handed out surveys at the end of each semester to analyze the quality of their teaching and their teaching materials. We emailed different education professors in the US to get their opinion as we crafted the questions for the survey. We also emailed high school principals to  find out how they have been assessing  the quality of education in their schools. Using these, we crafted questions for the surveys. We got the surveys translated to Kannada to be distributed to two PV schools.


We visited the schools and were well received by the students. They were excited to see us(more excited to see Kristen since I look just like every other kid in the class) and were more interested in getting to know us than answering the surveys. Once we collected the completed surveys, we had to wait 3 days for them to be translated. We analyzed the surveys only to find that the answers were not what we were hoping for. We were hoping to find the learning processes the students are using while learning with the video. We were also to find other factors that might influence the child's ability to learn in class(lack of motivation to go to school).


With these, we realized that we had to conduct more research to improve our method of gathering data. I'll talk more about our progress in the next few posts.

The Journey Begins!

It's been more than three weeks since I arrived in India and we are already halfway through our respective projects. I am currently working with PremaVidya.

PremaVidya is under the umbrella organization called Swami Vivekananda Youth Movement. This organization was started by a group of medical students in 1984 in Mysore. While pursuing their medical education, they felt that the medical career they envisioned was not the same as what they were learning. Therefore, they decided to start of small, by helping a group of displaced tribal people in the rural Mysore area. They started with a small clinic and this organization eventually grew and they currently work with over 60 projects in the socioeconomic, education and health sector.

PremaVidya currently has a few initiatives under them but the one that I am working with is called Project 1947. Project 1947 is a project dedicated to the freedom fighters in India. One of the main goals of this project is to make and distribute video lessons to complement lessons in school. There is no copyright restriction and the videos are available for everyone. The mission of this project is to increase the pass percentages of the Secondary School Leaving Certificate(SSLC). SSLC exam is a public exam done at the final year of secondary schooling in India and is literally a ticket to higher education or jobs.

I will be recapping what happened over the past 3 weeks with lots and lots and pictures and a few words. Feel free to keep up with my blog and please don't hesitate to contact me if you have any questions. I can be easily reached through my email