Masti Ki Pathshala

Indore city is the business capital of Madhya Pradesh and a lot of people from the deprived community migrate here to search for livelihood opportunities. Most of these people used to engage in labor, street vending, and other temporary works. In most of the cases, both father and mother used to work, resulting in children not getting proper foster facilities. The most productive years of these children which should be spent in classrooms are wasted on streets in activities like begging. In Indore, almost every traffic signal sees children performing begging activities or convincing people to purchase small articles.

Masti Ki Pathshala, an informal school, is an integrated approach towards improving the quality of education for underprivileged children. It seeks to ensure pre-primary and primary education for all children up to the age of 14 leading to their overall development. The project shall be implemented in five slums of Indore city targeting 250 children i.e. 50 children in each community. These community centers will be designed as an interesting classroom to provide alternate educational facilities to the underprivileged children. Efforts will be made to enroll these children in formal schools at the beginning of the next academic year. Other key components of the project include a community based educational programme, school partnership programme and working with adolescent children from the community.

Five community-based centers called the “Masti Ki Pathshala will be established for the underprivileged and school dropout children. These community centers will be organizing daily classes and recreational activities for the children so that they can develop their interest in education. Various tools i.e. audio-visuals will be used to make studies interesting. One teacher will be appointed in each community center who will organize daily classes for the

children. The teacher will also identify any requirement of educational material in the classes, i.e. notebooks, school books, story books etc. The informal community center will be conducted in all the identified areas to attract children with the help of various recreational and video audio-visual classes to link them in regular formal schooling. Around 250 children will be benefited by this project. All the 250 school dropout children will be linked with the formal education and they will be developed as change agents to address child protection issues in their communities.