Rising together

Narrating a case of brilliant minds emerging despite abject poverty, Krishna Kumari cites the case of young Janardhan. “He lived under a flyover with an abusive father. Close to the dates of the board exams, he was nervous as there was no place to study under the noisy bridge. We keep the school premises open till late during exams for such brilliant children. Janardhan cleared the boards with a CGPA of 9.8/10. Now he is pursuing his 10+2 in Hyderabad.”
The results of regular education have been seen in myriad ways. Headmistress at Fatehnagar, T. Jayanti says, “Cleanliness and hygiene have improved considerably. The habit has carried on to their homes and the locality, which is also clean now.”
Not just old students, new ones are happy too. Young Kirtana is among the happy lot. She says, “The standard of teaching is very good. I am keen on taking up B.Sc. Agriculture because I love flowers, plants and trees.” Scientific temper and innovation are encouraged and the schools have upgraded facilities and labs. There is an Agastya Lab on the lines of Atal Tinkering Lab. On display are some innovative prototypes made by the students. The idea of making a cantilever bridge came to Nagendra and Kartik while watching a movie on TV.
Curious about the operations of this, the duo ended up making a model that functions flawlessly. Their career choices are diverse— Nagendra wants to become a cop, Kartik wants to do hotel management.
Rajeshwari, who is in class IX, wants to specialise in civil engineering. She has developed a prototype of automatic street light device. “We have ‘A grade’ teachers who produce ‘A grade’ students. I want to turn Agastya Lab into a very good lab,” she says.
Not just classroom teaching, physical education is equally strong at the schools. Santosh Bidarkar, physical education teacher at Fatehnagar, says, “Students love sports and focus is on traditional and indoor games. As we don’t have a large playground, our students practice at the municipality ground, this is 2 km away. They have participated in state and national handball tournaments and two of our girl students have represented the school in international tournaments.”

“As the cyclothon promotes employee engagement at RBL Bank, we plan it around the places where the Bank has presence. We had to do a lot of preparation, such as finalising the concept, coming up with a name, designing the logo, planning the route, and then preparing the body and mind for raising the endurance level. I began practicing about three months in advance. I took the help of a trainer, got myself a good bike.” Over the years, the response has been heart-warming. And the focus is on educating the girl child.

For education, the bank started by supporting multiple schools and has multiple initiatives, even in remote areas like Alwar and Mewat. “The desire to support Udbhav School in Hyderabad emerged after the first successful fund raising cyclothon by Jasmeet Singh Gandhi, from Mumbai to Bengaluru. This was a fundraiser for children affected by Retinoblastoma. We named it UMEED 1000. We raised close to Rs 30 lakh. This success encour - aged us to keep this fund-raising programme going. In the second year, more people came forward and three of our employees cycled from Mumbai to Delhi. That year we raised more than Rs 1 crore. The strength of volunteers has been growing. We treat our volun - teer employees as on duty. They have a daily 100 km gruelling ride and we give them all the support in this. The trust and joy of con - tributing to a cause have shown many benefits—they perform better and are more compassionate.”
Looking at this remarkable shift in all ways, Shanta Vallury Gandhi says, “Our flagship Udbhav School project is a model school. And we have so much support from the experts running it. We will now tie up with an NGO that trains children for medical, engineering, and other professional courses. We have tied up with multiple NGOs to provide livelihood opportunities for children.”
RBL Bank has tied up with an NGO called Agastya which runs incubation centres, encouraging students to think differently and be innovative. The aim of the bank is to make every project selfsustaining and the same is applicable for Udbhav School.

After chancing upon a cause, how did you prepare for it?

We reached out to friends and family to see who could help. In the first year, 2014, we supported an NGO in Bengaluru that was funding the treatment of children suffering from eye cancer (Retinoblastoma). Post that, we have been raising funds for girl child education with our NGO partner in Hyderabad. RBL Bank has been our main sponsor and supporter every year. Besides, we approach other corporate CSR teams, RBL Bank customers and employees to support us in raising money. We do a lot of physical and mental training, which is equally important. Our cyclothon is always held in December due to cooler weather. After a lot of deliberation, we chose to name it UMEED1000. Umeed means hope and 1000 denotes the kms we cycle every year. Now, six years down the line UMEED 1000 is a brand. From a solo rider in 2014, we have managed to inspire 35 bank employees to cycle the entire route in 2019. Our itineraries take a lot of diligent preparation. We travel 100 –125 km a day and there are direct interactions with school children, employees and dealers of our sponsors because the entire journey is about creating awareness and local support. Sometimes, we have to go off-the-track too to fulfill employee or sponsor engagement commitments

Your experience with Udbhav...

Udbhav has been our NGO partner for the past four years. The management team is really passionate about girl child education. They leave no stone unturned in terms of taking care of the cyclists, motivating us along the way.

How would you sum up the entire experience?

We have a reliable partner in RBL Bank and a committed NGO partner in Udbhav. Our aim is to educate 10,000 students in five years and we already have over 1,000 girls being educated. Last year, Udbhav had 100 per cent result—all the students secured a first class score. Besides this some of the students are representing India in sports at national and international competitions. This helps us to think bigger and do more for the deserving children.