Special Website To Reach More Out-of-School Children in Pune

The 'Right To Education Act 2009' (RTE) provides right of 'Free and Compulsory' Education to all children within 6 to 14 age group. However, the children and parents who need this most, are not seen to be aware of their rights. As a result, even in the third year of RTE implementation, we can see a large number of out-of-school children around us. With an objective to identify such children in Pune city and to ensure their enrollment in nearby PMC schools, a citizens' campaign - 'Every Child Counts' (ECC) - was launched in November 2011.

Last year, with the help of citizen volunteers and NGO's in Pune, this campaign could reach out to more than 2,500 children and enrol about 700 of them in PMC schools across Pune city. The biggest challenge before this campaign was, and is, to find out children (and parents) who need support in reaching schools. On the other hand, citizens commuting daily on the city roads, see many school-age children at traffic signals, on footpaths, and near labour colonies. However willing to help, a common citizen does not know to whom and where to report about these children.

With the experience gained through ECC citizens' campaign, the NGO working for education of underprivileged children in Pune - Door Step School - has designed a special website where any citizen can report about out-of-school children found in the city. The website uses Google Maps to locate exact address of reporting, and upon answering few questions about children, the citizen contribution is published on this website. The ECC campaign team also gets notified about citizen contribution by e-mail, which further helps in finding out children from exact location, thus expediting their school admission process. Any citizen can register on www.eccpune.org/reportchildren and start contributing information about out-of-school children.

A demo session of this website was organised for members of the PMC School Board. The Board is hopeful about usefulness of this website and has mentioned that the information collected through citizen contributions will help ‘PMC School Enrollment Drive’ this year. The website has been developed with technical support from Pune-based software company, Maven Systems as a CSR initiative, with inputs from research team of Tata Institute of Social Sciences (Mumbai). The 'Every Child Counts' campaign team extends their appeal to citizens of Pune for using this website to help out-of-school children reach schools in large numbers. To know more about www.eccpune.org/reportchildren website and the Citizens’ campaign for Right To Education, please contact:

Rajani Paranjpe - 9371007844
Mandar Shinde - 9822401246