SSC Descriptive Writing Precis Writing SSC-CGL (TIER-III) - Passage on Pahal

PASSAGE ON PAHAL

Pahal, the remarkable educational NGO that runs ASER, not only exposes the deficiencies of the educational system but also tries to fix them. We have been working with them for the last ten years, evaluating almost every new edition of their program for teaching children arithmetic and reading. Our association started in the year 2000 in western India, in the cities of Nagpur and Rewari, where Pahal was running what they called the Balsaheli (meaning "children's friend") program.

The program took the twenty children in each classroom that needed help and sent them to work with the Balsaheli, a young woman from the community, on their specific areas of weakness. Despite a drought and communal riots, the program generated very large gains in test scores for these children-"in Nagpur, about twice the magnitude of the average gains from private schooling that have been found in India. Yet these Balsaheli were much less educated than the average private (or public) school teacher-many of them had barely ten years of schooling, plus a week's training by Pahal.

Given these results, many organizations would have rested on their laurels.

Not Pahal. The idea of resting anywhere, least of all on their laurels, is entirely foreign to Ram's personality or that of Rashmi Baweja, the human dynamo who is the driving force behind Pahal spectacular expansion. One way in which Pahal could reach more children was by having communities take over the program. In the Baliya District in the eastern part of Uttar Pradesh, India's largest state and one of the poorest, Pahal volunteers went from village to village testing children and encouraging the community to get involved in the testing to see for themselves what their children knew and didn't know. The parents were not thrilled by what they saw-their first instinct often was to try to smack their children-but eventually a set of volunteers from the community emerged, ready to take on the job of helping their little brothers and sisters. They were mostly young college students who held classes in the evening in their neighborhoods. Pahal gave them a week of training but no other compensation.

We evaluated this program as well, and the results were quite dramatic: By the end of the program, all the participating children who could not read before the program could at least recognize letters (in contrast, only 40 percent of those in the comparison villages could read letters by the end of the year). Those who could read only letters at the beginning were 26 percent more likely, by the end, to be able to read a short story if they had participated than if they had not.

PRECIS

THE BALSAHELI PROGRAMME

The author has been working in association with an NGO called Pahal that introduced a new programme called Balsaheli child's friend), which trained volunteers from communities in basic tutoring. The Balsaheli trained the kids in their specific areas of weakness and the kids advanced much after it in spite of adversities faced, by them. The organization, under the inspiring leadership of Ram and Rashmi Baweja, extended their work to Baliya district of Uttar Pradesh, where the people initially protested only to turn supportive later, they got the same results.