These MNC executives gave up fat paychecks to teach in municipal schools

Buried neck deep in work from Monday to Friday, sometimes even Saturday, Srini Swaminathan could easily pass off as high-flying mid-level executive working for a MNC.

He is perpetually strategising on how to lure customers, new policies that can be implemented to increase customer satisfaction.

The only difference is his customers are neither well-heeled urban citizens nor folks from semi-urban setups brimming with new found disposable incomes.

“They are the toughest ones to market anything,” says Swaminathan, referring to a group of about 30 children of Class II.
Until recently, Swaminathan was working in Melbourne with Schlumberger, a leading oilfield services provider.

Now, every noon, he treads into the very spine of Dharavi, into dingy bylanes flanked by tin-roof ‘kholis’ housing a dozen people.

Walking into the maze of Asia’s largest slum, Swaminathan is welcomed with open arms by the high-spirited laughter and the innocent prattle of his students at the Dharavi Transit Camp Municipal School.

After eight years, this electrical and electronics engineer quit his top-notch job, where he handled a team of 100 employees, to teach children at the municipal school.

“All of us will go to college one day,” reads a placard on top of the blackboard in Swaminathan’s class, which is cluttered with drawings, numbers and tables all over the walls.

“Good education can smash the cage of poverty,” says Swaminathan, revealing that he could reach a top position only because of his mother’s determination to educate him, despite having to run the house single-handedly on a shoe string budget.

“To make an impact in the lives of these kids, I had to get down to full-time teaching, rather than volunteer on weekends,” he says.

Like Swaminathan, IITian Saurabh Taneja also makes his way into a municipal school, albeit in Bandra, to teach algebra, HCF, LCM, factorisation, grammar, etc. to 50 children of Class V.

While volunteering for a NGO during his graduation, Taneja came across a bright young slum girl, who expressed a desire to study in IIT.

“All children have the potential in some area or the other, which has to be honed at the right time. I was lucky to get good education, and thereafter a good job. I wanted to help other less fortunate children get a strong educational footing,” says Taneja, who quit his job as a consultant in WNS Bangalore in 2009, to dive into education.

Quitting high-paying jobs to teach in municipal schools, on a monthly salary of Rs15,000, is something that has whetted Aparna Sharma and mechanical engineer Pankaj Mohan, who is from New Delhi.

Sharma, who was working as an assistant vice-president- commercial bank-product group with Citibank, quit her job recently, and is planning to teach children from a municipal school.

These professionals belong to a set of people who are devoting two years to become teachers for poor children, as part of an initiative by a non-profit organisation, Teach for India, started two years ago, which is aiming to reach over 60,000 children by 2015, from municipal and low-income schools in Mumbai Pune, New Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, Hyderabad and Bangalore.

“These children end up teaching us aspects of life such as honesty, perseverance, studying in environments unfriendly to education, etc, which corporate life does not,” says Mohan, who was working in the plant engineering department of Tata Motor’s Pantnagar plant.

Shveta Raina, director, recruitment and marketing, Teach for India, says that to reach 60,000 kids, over 1600 graduates and professionals would be required to function as full-time teachers.

Paucity of teachers is a key issue, with statistics by World Bank, Unesco, etc stating that in India, one in four teachers in a municipal or low-income private school is absent on any given day.

“There is a need to enhance the teaching methods and level of interaction in municipal schools, in order to generate interest for education amongst student. Hence, there is a requirement for graduates and professionals to get involved,” says Srinivasan Gowrishankar, a graduate from National Law School of India University in Bangalore, who is a class teacher for standard III in a municipal school in Dharavi.

Swaminathan says in June, most students in his class had no clue of English, but today, several can understand and communicate in basic English.

“By getting into such schools, professionals can help address the teacher crunch, and make learning more interesting for these kids,” says Taneja, who plans to continue in education, instead of going back to corporate life.

“Teaching these children also plugs the cord that links us to the real India,” echoes Swaminathan.