Ekal School Abhiyan | 07 Dec 2019
Why in News
Recently, the Prime Minister admired the role of Ekal Vidyalaya Sangathan for leading the ‘Ekal School Abhiyan’ and in nation-building by imparting education and awareness to more than 2.8 million rural and tribal children who reside in the remotest locations across India and Nepal.
Key Points
- ‘Ekal School Abhiyan’ aims to promote education among rural and tribal children.
- The Sangathan has remarkably promoted the education amongst rural and tribals through the ‘Panchatantra Model of Education’ that include:
- Promotion of nutrition through Poshan Vatikas,
- Training for bio-fertilizers use in farming,
- Imparting skills for using medicinal qualities of herbs,
- Training for employment, and
- Generation of Social Awareness.
- This helps in realizing Gandhi's ideals of ‘Gram Swaraj’, ‘Social Justice’ of Baba Saheb, ‘Antyodaya’ of Deen Dayal Upadhyay, and Swami Vivekanand’s ‘dream of a Glorious India’.
- Ekal Sangathan makes the use of e-education and digitization to achieve the desired objective and aims to launch a single real-time dashboard for monitoring the progress of all the Ekal Vidyalayas in a comprehensive way.
- Ekal Vidyalaya is a movement involving integrated and holistic development of rural & tribal people of India and Nepal. The main activity undertaken in this movement is to run one-teacher schools (known as Ekal Vidyalayas) all over India, in the remotest villages so as to educate every child.
- The Ekal movement aims to help eradicate illiteracy following the philosophy of rural development based on the criteria of equality and inclusiveness across all the sections of the society.
- Recognition: The Ekal Vidyalaya Sangathan has been awarded the Gandhi Peace Prize in 2017 for its contribution in providing education for rural and tribal children in remote areas, rural empowerment, gender, and social equality.
- Other schemes of government like scholarship for scheduled tribe’s children, Eklavya model residential school, Poshan Abhiyan, Mission Indradhanush, and school holidays on the occasion of tribal festivals, etc. have helped not only in checking the school dropout rates but also promoted the holistic development of children.