How it all began?
One day during Feb/March 2022 Sai Pramod, from Alokit called me to talk about the Ankuram project in Narayanpet, Telangana that aimed to work on the Foundation and Numerical Literacy in around 55 schools, spanning multiple districts and mandals. As part of the same, they also wanted to establish libraries in schools and hence the call to Joy of Reading.
Narayanpet is a relatively new district located in the Southern part of Telangana and shares borders with Karnataka and Maharashtra. Its about 170km from Hyderabad
Fun fact: : Narayanpet is famous for its handloom industry and the Narayanpet sarees are popular throughout the state !! In case you are wondering about our title 😊 .
Ankuram was a large project and involved working closely with the education department of the government in order to see good results. Towards end of April an online meeting happened between Joy of Reading, Alokit and the government education official. The demographics of the schools, criteria for selection of schools etc was discussed. The initial target was to setup libraries atleast for around 20 schools across the different mandals.
Talk about coincidences or the universe conspiring to make things happen – Our first corporate sponsorship allocation came through in March 2022 as well when the Narayanpet project came our way. Narayanpet district schools required English story books in the lower levels. So we started working with wholesale suppliers, for books
that would be fun and easy to read and would attract a child to pick up the book. A set of 91 books was finalized for each school. It consisted of a mix of Pepper series, Early Grade Reader series, Funny Photo Phonics, Read Along stories, Rabindranath Tagore story series, Bruno series, and a few Information books (Great Junior Encyclopedia, 200 Facts and Questions on various topics). Lots of coordination has to be done to get them to our storage space which was in a narrow steep gully.
Thanks to Sakku group who enabled funding of books for 20 schools in Narayanpet.
Time of several volunteers was spent in sorting and labeling and packing these new books. The books were packed separately for each school with carton boxes procured from various recycle suppliers. It was a back breaking effort literally !!
Pramod then came and took the whole bunch of boxes in his car and took them to Narayanpet on one of his visits, thus transporting the books without incurring any transport costs.
It has always been the selfless efforts of several volunteers who are responsible for the very many behind the scenes effort in pulling together a project. When it takes a village to educate a child imagine how many it would take to educate a village full of schools !! Check out our next part on what happened thereafter.
