hoysala charitable trust

The New Education Policy is very much in line with our thinking in at least

two aspects: (a) Strong emphasis on Foundational Literacy and Numeracy which has

been Akshara’s forte for the past two decades; and (b) a more rational break-up

covering preschool and early grades of primary school, etc. The policy in itself will

take a while to be implemented and we plan to be an integral part of this process.

Akshara’s focus has always been working with Government Schools but all the

content that we have developed is available at no cost in public domain through a

Creative Commons licence and over the years more than 5000 individuals and

organizations have downloaded our material from our website and put them to use

– this includes many private schools and teachers.

If it is a private school they can download content from Akshara’s website and start implementing; if it is a government school, they will have to work through their system and get approvals to use our material. (b) It may not be the right time to share the 50:50 concept with all schools now – we have to wait till the pilot is over and the results are available.

 The 50:50 model was in response to the difficulties that we expect from the Covid pandemic. The pilot will be done beginning next month and we will be sharing updates on a regular basis. 

Akshara’s annual budget is over Rs 6 crores (See our Annual Reports available on our website https://akshara.org.in . Further, Karnataka state government spends over Rs 8 crores on Ganitha Kalika Andolana. 

 Since Akshara works at large scale, it is somewhat misleading to answer this for a specific school of 100 students because many of our resources are amortized across multiple schools. But if you look at what the state spends, what communities raise and what we as Akshara raise, then the cost per child per year to teach children math works out to about Rs 200-250 per year. 

Funding for Akshara Foundation to continue to study the gaps, innovate and come up with answers and implement them across schools. 2. Akshara is creating a set of Teacher Training videos. They are being created in Kannada. We plan on getting them dubbed into Hindi and English, so that we can reach a wider audience. We need volunteers to watch the Kannada videos and translate and transcribe the audio into English - in a Microsoft Word document, That document will then become the script for when we record the same in English. 3. Akshara has a lot of data that needs analysis – some of you may be professionally qualified in areas such as data analytics and we could use your support. 

Please get in touch with us and we will have specific needs that we can share with you depending on where you are in Mangalore.

GKA was operational in all schools in Karnataka pre-Covid. Post Covid we have to do the following: (a) Get Teacher Training videos edited, shared with State Government and upload on Diksha for teacher use – to be finished before mid-September 2020 ; (b) Child training videos to be shot, edited, etc. by October 2020; (c) Start pilot implementation of 50:50 model September 2020; (d) get content translated into multiple languages – before November 2020.