Improving the quality of education delivered by public schools was the initial area of focus for more than a decade for us as an organization. To achieve this, we set out to create a program which is scalable and replicable for the government to take over and run it across all its schools. We early on identified that, in the school ecosystem there was a lack of motivation, less focus on structured practice and sub optimal use of resources as the possible reasons for the less than desired quality of education delivered. Our first program “Prerana” addresses this to a large extent and is currently running in over 50,000 schools across 6 states of which the government of Karnataka is currently running the program in all its schools in the state.

Use of technology for learning and for managing various programs in schools, is another area where we have been working since 2007 and this has resulted in development of Mobile Apps and other IT support systems. Some of these have found a home in the Karnataka state data center like the school program management app called NiB-KA (Nipun Bharath – Karnataka) and student learning systems like Sikshanapedia App and the ePBL webapp.

Even under the school programs we have always had parents and community involvement to help sustain the improvement in schools. But during covid we started directly working with the community when the schools were closed and also started our work in gram panchayat library reading program along with Rural Development & Panchayat Raj (RDPR) department. Our interactions with the rural community members led us to identify the need to create a digitally literate community as the technology (especially mobile based) started to become ubiquitous. This led to the development of our first scaled up community program “Grama Digi Vikasana” which is currently running in over 2791 gram panchayats.

During the pandemic, a few IAS officers in Karnataka who were aware of our tech strength called upon us to develop software systems to help the state government provide optimal health care services to the people especially in rural parts. We managed a covid war room software for Ramanagar district, tweaked our school app to enlist doctors and nurses to man the Aptamitra helpline and developed an app for Asha workers to track health parameters of every rural household in Ramanagar district.