Our Support to Some Individual Students
Since the inception of the project Sahaj Path, we taught the students in a group, mainly to build up their foundation and to move them forward toward the next step with confidence. When our work was over at Rammohon Vidya Mandir for Girls’ High School in 2012, one student, then promoted to class VII was very keen to continue her studies and sought our support. We supported her till graduation level from the Aruna Majumdar Endowment Fund. Now she is doing her M.Sc. in Microbiology.
In 2017 we met a brilliant boy who had qualified for JEE, but it was difficult for him to continue his B. Tech without financial support. With our full sponsorship, he passed the B. Tech Exam and joined a renowned company as a junior engineer.
Similarly, there are many such students who are needy but meritorious and face hurdles to continue and complete his/her academic journey due to paucity of funds. We decided to extend monetary support to such students after proper screening.
We collect information about the students from newspapers or from personal contacts. We visit their residences and schools, talk to the family members and teachers, and after a thorough inquiry, decide to grant the scholarship if they fulfill our criteria.
We help the candidates regularly for an academic year to support tuition fees, admission fees, cost of books, etc, and renew the scholarship on appraisal. We grant such scholarships once or both according to necessity.
We experienced that there are so many talented students from different family backgrounds like domestic help, marginal farmers, masons, hawkers, barbers, carpenters, vendors, bidi binders, and so on, where financial hardship is the main obstacle to their studies.
We even, find some students who are the sole earning members of the family and are pursuing their studies along with doing jobs to earn bread for their families. We are supporting and have supported around 40 such students starting from class V to MBBS from Kolkata, Howrah, South 24 Parganas, North 24 Parganas, Purulia, Burdwan, Nadia, and Hooghly District.
We keep track of their progress and collect feedback regularly from their tutors and from the individual by personal contact. We keep the results of various examinations in our records to assess their progress.
During the lockdown, these students continued their studies online but network problems, unavailability of smartphones, and lack of involvement in classroom teaching made it difficult for them to learn properly. We provided smartphones to some of them who did not have smartphones.
During such periods, we used to hold virtual meetings with the students at regular intervals to keep them in touch and to motivate them during grave situations. Since 2017, 36 such students have been getting scholarships under this scheme.
