When a Short-Term Social Internship Turned Into an Enduring Commitment

Much has been said and written about chance encounters that alter life paths and forge unanticipated relationships. Here’s an inspiring one from IIITH alumni Chandan Shrivastava and Nikhil Agrawal’s pages.

It was meant to be a routine 2-month-long internship at Eklavya, a non-profit based out of Madhya Pradesh. As part of the initial field study to lay out the ground work, Chandan and Nikhil, who were then final year BTech students of Computer Science, hit the ground running by first getting to know the organisation itself, the ‘why’ behind it, and the children being impacted by it. “We are all aware of a section of society that lacks basic rights like an access to education, but we typically don’t pay much attention. In the hinterlands of Madhya Pradesh, we experienced up close what it’s like to be enthusiastic about going to school and learning but being unable to do so,” narrates Chandan. It really hit hard when the duo found themselves in conversation with a young boy who casually remarked that that he had studied till Grade 6 and ought to have been in Grade 8 now. “He had to drop out because he couldn’t afford it,” notes Nikhil, adding that to his surprise the boy spoke in fluent English. He had been a regular at the Eklavya learning centres and their libraries.

Education For Everyone
Eklavya, inspired by the legend from the Mahabharata seeks to improve mainstream education and to bring it within the reach of everyone. Headquartered in Bhopal with several other centers in Madhya Pradesh, the organisation works on multiple programs in developing education material. Some of their projects are also run in collaboration with various state governments. Explaining their mission, Tultul Biswas, Director, Eklavya Foundation says, “Many of the children in rural villages are either first-generation or maybe second-generation school-goers. It therefore becomes very difficult to sustain the demands of a formal school-based education system because there are no support systems for these kids from their own families. Hence Eklavya has tried to come up with a social solution by leveraging the sense of community.” Among the many community-led activities that the non-profit is involved in, two stand out: The running of Community Learning Centres or the ‘Shiksha Protsahan Kendras’, where a youth member from the same community, either a village or a hamlet is mutually identified by the Eklavya team and the community elders to carry out learning support classes for children with the active guidance of Eklavya. Similarly, the Foundation also runs libraries, known as ‘Chakmak Clubs’. “While libraries are an integral part of learning centres, the stand-alone Chakmak clubs build on the agency that children have. So, in effect these clubs are run by older children for their peers in a particular area,” describes Tultul.

The Problem
Initially, the Foundation worked on traditional attendance registers before moving on to spreadsheets to log attendance. Tracking students’ presence at the centres was done in order to view the correlation between student presence at the centres and their corresponding learning achievements. “However, it took up a considerable proportion of the facilitators’ time on the ground and we began exploring how we could benefit from a technological intervention by minimising their time on such administrative tasks while maximising that spent with children instead,” remarks Tultul. 

It was Prof. Harjinder Singh, Center for Computational Natural Sciences and Bioinformatics (CCNSB), IIITH who proposed the idea of a meaningful internship at Eklavya to the IIITH students who were on the lookout for something on the same lines.  Prof. Singh or Laltu as he is affectionately known has himself had an over-four decade-long association with Eklavya. “From his days in Punjab University, he has had a lasting relationship through the Hoshangabad Science Teaching Program which was a singular experiment in introducing the ‘Discovery’ approach to learning Science in village schools and a source of inspiration for other educational initiatives across the country,” narrates Tultul. 

The Solution
Since Eklavya required a tech tool that could not only track  those who were showing up regularly but also to view the number of dropouts and analyse the possible reasons for the same, while simultaneously strategising on a plan to reduce it, the students came up with a solution in the form of an app. This acts like a database tracking all the projects that Eklavya currently spearheads. “You can view project-level data for any state, district, block and center. Consolidated attendance can be viewed for a particular center, and even at the individual level, i.e, for each student. We have also set thresholds so if a particular student’s attendance falls below a certain level, it gets highlighted. This way, necessary intervention can take place in the form of special assistance to such students who might possibly have dropped out because they are getting overwhelmed,” explains Nikhil. After listening to the Eklavya team’s requirements, the IIITH students tried to ease things for the educators by creating a link-based web app. “This obviates the need for a computer or a laptop. They don’t even need to install an app. A link where they enter their credentials will take them to the webpage we created where they can mark student attendance,” says Chandan. Additionally, there are other features of the web app such as attendance tracking based on gender, and so on.

Other Projects
While the attendance management system was one of the projects that the duo worked on, there were a few others too such as the development of an automatic backup generator. To explain why a need for one such arose, Tultul says, “Our website is like a treasure trove of reading material for children and teachers alike because we have been consistently publishing since 1983 to fill the gaps that we find in childrens’ literature. All of this is freely downloadable in the form of PDF files; some childrens’ stories are also available as audio stories or as flipbooks for anybody to access free of cost. In the last 3 years or so, we’ve had repeated hacking attempts, some of which have even damaged a few files. Hence, we wanted a regular backup system in place so that in the event of such online attacks, it would be easy to revert to the previous week’s version of files.” 

Besides this, the team tried to analyse how to leverage various online benefits that exist for non-profits. “There are YouTube and several ad features which if triggered appropriately can help in generating donations from all over India,” remarks Chandan, adding that there are many offerings by big corporations like Google to NGOs, such as the use of Google domains and Google IDs. 

Eklavya hosts their entire bookstore on the Shopify app where the books are available for purchase. Nikhil and Chandan discovered that there were some issues with the website where images were getting cropped, discounts not being displayed correctly, and so on. “We took a look inside the core and configuration of Shopify and made a set of recommendations on how to fix or improve some of the issues faced. We covered not only what needed to be changed, but how to change so that Eklavya can benefit from the revamp,” says Nikhil. 

Continued Engagement
One of the projects that the IIITH alumni are still working on well after the completion of the internship is that of the automated magazine subscription system. All the Eklavya magazine publications such as Chakmak, Sandarbh, Srote, that are released monthly are managed in a database and dispatched manually from a center in Bhopal. “We are aiming to automate the entire system so that right from when the orders are placed – on Amazon, Shopify, or the Eklavya website – it will be fetched automatically into the system along with the subscription  information for each subscriber. This includes details such as the number of issues dispatched, the number remaining, and so on,” explains Nikhil. 

Lasting Impressions
Eklavya typically attracts interns from either the IT or the Design field, the former for the webpages they maintain and the latter for all the publishing work they do. “So there is this beautiful blend of domain expertise along with social sensitization that these internships are able to bring about. In the case of Nikhil and Chandan, the whole thing of not being aware of the lived realities of many other children in in our country, and the sense of being able to do a little bit for these children was something quite remarkable. It was nice to see that in addition to being able to bring their technological expertise on the table, they were also taking back this awareness and sensitivity with them,” says Tultul. “What these students have shied away from revealing is that they have donated a significant chunk of money towards Eklavya. I’m really happy that IIITH has been able to inspire them by sending them for such an internship,” concludes Prof. Singh. For Nikhil and Chandan themselves, the internship may have long ended with them moving on to pursue professional careers at Google and Oracle respectively, but it’s just the beginning of a lifelong commitment to the NGO’s causes.