Educating J&K: Project Parwaaz

I didn’t sleep for nights, things started bothering me why I can’t help. These children deserve that environment — Aiesha Jaan, a Jammu college girl who started an initiative to teach rural area’s underprivileged children which later became Project Parwaaz.

Creating a good educational environment is considered a key factor in the development of any place, it takes a collaborative effort of people to build that environment that can nurture future generations.

Photo by Perry Grone on Unsplash

Due to conflicting situations in the state, students suffer a lot especially students of rural areas with poor financial conditions. In Marmat (a village in J&K province), one such instance that Aiesha addressed during her time in the village.

I always had a soft corner for economically deprived people. And I believe, money shouldn’t be the blocker between their children and Elementary Education.

Because of discontinuity in school operations, there are definite gaps in their education. So I took this initiative on my own and started to teach them, importantly inspire others to do so. later, I created a group of local people to establish this environment to an extent — Aiesha

Environment Setup

To facilitate the children, Teach over Call (cause of only 2G availability) setup has been established with the help of locals volunteers. Things were starting to gear up but then due to Covid-19, National Lockdown imposed all over India. There was so much the uncertainty in lockdown lifting (it’s still here :P). But we worked on challenges despite the lockdown:

1. Volunteers on-boarding: In the lockdown when social media scrolling on the surge, we call out for volunteers across India. Surprisingly, the response was much higher than expected. From less than 10 (pre-lockdown number) to 200+ (still coming up) requests, we’ve got during the lockdown. That’s the power of social media.
2. Students on-boarding: Student’s self engagement was a vital factor in the success of this project (as this is remote teaching). As we hear from volunteer stories, we’ve got a big plus on this factor. But in the lockdown, onboarding new students is a major challenge though. As our team is constantly working on networking with local people with the help of volunteers.
3. Resource Arrangement: Aligning the educator and student on study material (either NCERT or J&K State board). Currently, volunteers using e-copy of books as reference for teaching. Some challenges are still there in Resource availability like there are some students who don’t have books still willing to learn (vital factor :D), but kudos to volunteers who pulled this off with creativity, and unique methods of their teaching. As lockdown eases, we’re also in the planning of providing books to those students.

Community Growth

Across different professions, regions people are putting their effort into a collaborative manner to help those children. Currently, we have 50+ students onboarded of class range between 6th to 10th and 100+ volunteers teaching those children different subjects. As we’re still calling out for volunteers, please reach out to us if you want to be a part of Project Parwaaz. Below are our social media handles:

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/project-parwaaz

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/projectparwaaz.in/

To read our volunteers’ experience: https://link.medium.com/PSU0rmKpU6

Thanks for reading the article.

I’m one of the volunteers of Project Parwaaz. I’ll be writing more stories in this blog post series. Please reach out me on my social media handle if you’ve any query or doubt:

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