Mamta Saikia, COO – Bharti Foundation
“Sanitation is one of our new programs, but Bharti mostly works in the field of education. 90% of our projects and resources are spent towards education program. We have our own 254 schools in the villages and these schools are completely free for the poor, unprivileged children. Not only fees, but even books, notebooks and stationeries are given to a kid to encourage them to attend school. We make sure that there is no barrier due to which a child, more specifically a girl child is debarred from attending school. It’s been 11 years since we are running these schools. We realized that no corporate foundation would have so much of fund so as to open a school where government schools are not available. So 3-4 years back we realized that we have that much of experience and processes to work in rural areas. Working in rural has many challenges – the prime being lack of teachers, proper resources and infrastructure. So we have been successful in creating a model and have also taken the learning that we have gathered from this model to the government schools and this how we started our program Satya Bharti Learning Centers and quality support program. Here we partner with government schools and by working together with teachers and students we try to enhance the quality of the schools. In 3-4 years, we have been successful in touching 1500 government schools. This is how we have worked towards bringing up a sustainable society, but the challenge is on how to scale this up. And of course if your model is strong, scaling up is an easy task.”
Mamta Saikia was one of the panelists for the panel discussion held at the 3rd edition of ‘SPO India CSR Summit & Awards 2017′ in New Delhi on 25th May. The main theme of the event was “Marching Towards Sustainable Economy through CSR’. The Summit brought all stakeholders from NGOs, corporates and government on a common platform thereby enabling them to network and interact on how to make Indian economy sustainable through CSR.
