A touch in the right direction

National  Institute of Technology Karnataka (NITK) in Surathkal is considered one of the top engineering colleges in India. The students who get in are deemed the brightest of the crop. But with the fees being hiked due to the new government policy, things are such that they have to be both bright and rich in order to hold on to their place.

Jagdeep Gambhir, an alumnus of NITK who graduated in 2008, found that within a short time the semester fees have been doubled since he was a student there and there were dropouts who could not afford to pay semester fees, despite being meritorious enough to get in.

Sitting in Bangalore, Gambhir, along with friends Narayan Srinivasan, Pranay Kotasthane, Radhesh Gupta and Adhiraj Badyal, were sufficiently disturbed to find a solution to this. They founded the organisation Sparsh, aimed at providing some sort of a monetary relief to students who were needy. They approached the alumni of NITK and formed a corpus that would pay at least one semester’s fees for deserving candidates.

“When we went back to college we found that fees had doubled in two years. The government has decided that since engineering graduates get cushy jobs, there’s no point in subsidising their education. A lot of students who were economically backward could not pay the fees and opted out of college. These were people who could not even take loans, since they didn’t have money enough to provide security collateral to the banks. These were students who were good enough to get into one of the best engineering colleges without any coaching as they couldn’t afford tutors. And now, they couldn’t afford education,” says Gambhir.

They decided to enroll the alumni for the cause. “There is always an attachment to one’s alma mater. Therefore, looking at alumni contribution made sense. We reached out to the alumni, we built a website and in time we roped in about 95 or 98 alumni who were willing to contribute,” Gambhir says.

The contributions ranged from a thousand rupees to a lakh. Armed with the corpus, the Sparsh team visited the campus, put up posters and sought out students who needed the monetary relief. They offered 17 scholarships, eight in the first semester and nine in the second. As Gambhir explains: “We could pay one semester’s fees for each of the applicants. We could not sponsor their entire education at NITK, but we figured even pitching in with one semesters fees helped. People have some corpus. A bit of hand somewhere could tide them through till they could arrange for money.”

Students were free to apply for a second semester too. “We learnt as the project moved on and we change the model as and when required,” he goes on. Now Sparsh gives out one-year scholarships to students.

With the NITK project being a success, Sparsh then turned their attention to the other NITs and roped in Allahabad and Jaipur alumni too. They were already a registered NGO and were in a position to handle paperwork, tax relief, audits and funds that were being contributed. “We told them copy the idea and do it at your campus. We were able to provide them with the logistic support,” says Gambhir. This year they saw 269 students applying for the scholarships and the numbers are going up.

“An engineering course involves a lot of money. We can’t ask people to sponsor a student through college. And there is always a bit of mistrust where money is concerned. But any kind of contribution helps. We don’t know what the right answer is, but we’re determined to keep it going for as long as we can,” promises Gambhir.

Giving back is the mantra that the Sparsh team is taking to people. And if the model is replicated across institutions, there is some hope for the Indian education system which is so heavily tilted in favour of those who can purchase education instead of those who earn it through merit.

For details log on to : http://www.thesparshfoundation.org/