BENGALURU: A school for a child should not be anything less than a second home, but many schools in rural India lack basic infrastructure and amenities. To deal with this issue, One School at a Time (OSAAT), a city-based non-profitable organisation, work solely towards revamping rural government schools which are in dilapidated state.
OSAAT runs with around 50 core members in the team, majority of whom are US-based techies, out of which 25 of them primarily work on fund raising while the rest work on the execution. So far, OSAAT has brought around 29 schools across the rural part of India to life.
“We have worked in states like Karnataka, Maharashtra, Manipur, Uttar Pradesh and more. Our aim is to provide basic facilities like classroom, toilet, etc. We mostly work with rural schools because they are the ones that genuinely need help,” said M G Balakrishna Rao, a retired techie who has been with OSAAT for the past three years now.
Most of their work arises from word-of-mouth and they work with only rural government schools. The team’s next goal is to finish around 100 projects by 2025. “Honestly, money is not an issue. When it comes to education, many people are really generous, but we need more volunteers who would work on passion and not expect a salary. That’s the format we work on,” says NVGK Bhat, who became a part of OSAAT a couple of months ago. He also revealed that their projects cost an average of `40 lakh and their funding is heavily dependent on individual donors and corporate donations.
The team is now aiming to bring up 10 of flood-affected schools in Belagavi. “We already have donors for the project. In the next two months, we are planning to start work at least for two schools in Belagavi,” said 60-year-old Rao. two months, we are planning to start work at least for two schools in Belagavi,” he added.