21st May 2017
On May 14th, as part of the ShikshaDaan Yatra we went from Hyderabad to Vizag. Our plan was to meet with some of the potential partners there and also meet the team at Chegg India. It was also a significant visit personally since Krishnan and I celebrated Krishnan’s birthday there 27 years back in 1990. Vizag is the city from where I started my corporate career as well with NIIT, Vizag. So the visit was special for many reasons!
The drive was fantastic and we reached Hotel Green Park easily. Got settled in and were ready the next morning for our meetings with Chegg India, Laya and Srujanavani. The first meeting on the 15th was with Chegg India. Met Sam and the team there and shared our plans for their sponsorship.
The next meeting was with Laya, an NGO run by Ms. Nafisa D’Souza. Laya works with the tribal communities in Andhra and helps them find livelihood within their region. Amazing work that requires a lot of commitment. Read more about their work at their website – Laya. While ShikshaDaan may not have an immediate opportunity to partner with them, we would certainly like to work with them in the future as they design a vocational program for the adivasi students.
In the evening, the Srujanavani team came over to meet us. Rama Krishna Thota, Gyani, Narasingarao and Ratna Babu came over. What a huge inspiration for us to meet with them. All of them are young people who are committed to making a difference to the society. They all work in different organisations and have organised their work in such a way that they are able to spend maximum time on Srujanavani. Gyani and Ratna Babu are amongst the few folks who work full time for Srujanavani. We were thrilled to meet them and there is a lot of opportunity for us to partner with them.
On May 16th, we celebrated Krishnan’s birthday with a lunch at Daspalla Hotel, where we had dinner 27 years back. In the evening we went over to meet Kishore, the Vizag franchisee of NIIT for the past 27+ years and my first boss. We spoke about how we can support the ShikshaDaan scholars at Vizag by improving their computer skills.
On May 17th, we went over to the Science Activity Centre of Srujanavani at the Jilla Parishad School, Gopalapatnam. Amazing interaction with the students who were undergoing the summer camp run by Srujanavani. Tarak ji was able to join us there and we chatted some more about the Srujanavani-ShikshaDaan partnership. In the evening, we met with the young couple, Saket and Monika who have setup Samarth 16 to provide computer literacy programs to government school students. Again, we were very happy to see such young people getting into the space of giving back to the community… India is certainly in safe hands. They are yet to get registered and get all the government clearances so we can’t onboard them as partners but we will continue to stay in touch and try and support them as much as possible.
On 18th we got back to Hyderabad after a very fruitful visit to Vizag. There is a lot of good work happening in that city and all the meetings were very positive !