For change to happen, you either wait to see, or you choose to Be – Surya Pratap Deka @ One School for All

The following lines you are going to read will make sure that you see the change and feel it as well. One School for All is not a a concept, neither an idea but it is a creation with a vision that sees the whole country united as one, one with only one religion – ‘All is One & One is All’

Surya Pratap Deka

Tell us something –when did you realize the entrepreneur in yourself?

I believe everyone is a born entrepreneur. But few have the privilege like me of being nurtured in an atmosphere where risk taking, innovating and the urge to devote oneself to a cause greater than just him/her is simply a way of life. I have the earliest recollections of growing up to the story of how my grandfather left his cushy job in the Garo hills of Assam in the late forties when he could not bear the pain of seeing people poor and naked .He took five years off his work to invent the first spinning/ reeling machine as a means to improve the economic self sufficiency of the poor in Assam. For forty straight years, he sold the machine at a very marginal cost, with a lifelong guarantee for the machine, with free replacement of parts whenever and wherever, until the Department of Sericulture developed another machine in the nineties and it took over. Working on a non loss, non dividend model with social impact maximization as his sole goal, my grandfathers’ work bears a strong resemblance to the concept of social business as postulated by Muhammad Yunus some fifty years later.

That story was the beginning of an urge in me to create something of enduring value and being useful to people.

And how did the journey of being an entrepreneur led you to “One school for All” idea?

The urge to innovate and create led me to take up engineering as my field of technical education and then to work in diverse areas of business development, supply chain and marketing strategy in the corporate sector.

But after a few years as I was increasingly exposed to the works of Jeffrey Sachs, Muhammad Yunus,Wangari Maathai and the like, I realized the grave inequities existing outside the walls of my corporate castle and that there was a way out of it. And the Teach for India advertisement in the Times of India news paper one day was that one squarefoot of idealism for my entrepreneurial heart that I chose to respond to immediately. It is a program, which invites young leaders around the world for two years to solve the problem of educational inequity in our country. Over the last one year, my friend and a co Teach for India fellow Saurabh Taneja have been ideating on how to make excellent education available to each kid in our country. And one fine day, we arrived at our vision “One day there will be ‘One school for all’ in every neighborhood of India.”

Let us know about your current occupation. What you do, whatever you do?

Occupation is a little odd for what I do. I am committed to a cause, an enterprise.

My immediate enterprise comprises of a low-income municipal school in Pune and the under resourced community around it who believe, like me, that one day all children will have excellent education. My role as a teacher/educator is to build a commitment to excellence in my school, to impart the best of education as a part of our ‘Teaching as Leadership’ program to these kids, providing kids with life supporting skills and building mindsets of excellence by global standards to break their individual family cycles of poverty and other ills to make it big in life. My role as a community leader is to overcome barriers in the society to a good education system and student’s achievement, like educational inaccessibility, unmotivated school authorities/civic bodies, nonchalant representatives of Municipal Corporation, and family issues like nutritional hazards and malnourishment, abuses and violence, unsustainable economic conditions and a variety of social malaises.

Yet, my immediate enterprise is part of something bigger, a global movement called Teach for All, under which the India specific chapter called Teach for India was formally established in 2008 as a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to create a movement of leaders who will work to eliminate educational inequity in the country.

Like me, 253 other Fellows are working in the most challenging schools and communities of Mumbai and Pune serving around 6000 children and thousands of other stakeholders to create a better world where everyone is empowered by the virtues of a good education.

What made you to create the “One school for all” idea?

The vision of our project is : One day there will be “One school for all “in every neighborhood of India.

This is our dream of a just world, where the power of ONE is unleashed for the benefit of ALL. And the thrust is on the word all . Can we build high performance schools in India where the rich, poor, able, differently abled children all go to learn together, becoming effective leaders of today and change makers of tomorrow? What would it take to reach there?

Our model of one excellent school for everyone is based on the two strong pillars of excellent education and community entrepreneurship. We believe that these two E’s blended rightly would help create the next revolution of high performance schools in India with self reliant and invested communities of stakeholders around each excellent school ecosystem.

What is the main idea of “One school for all” idea?

Historically the concept of inclusive education is equated to include differently abled children in the mainstream and has flown down from institutions of some superiority or capacity to those needing help. This brings out the unique value proposition in my model. India’s first school opening its doors to kids from the slums and the best private schools in the world alike, to abled and differently abled kids alike by virtue of the excellent education and leadership skills that it provides, while employing a model of community entrepreneurship for the section of families from humble backgrounds around the school ecosystem making excellent education available to each kid, irrespective of where he/she some from. Something like the high performance KIPP schools in the US but with the inclusive and entrepreneurial model added to it.

The next obvious question is, in a school where the rich and poor go together, what is the model of sustenance? The answer lies in social business – a non loss, non dividend model with social impact maximization as its goal. This is the second challenge we are trying to address – to engage social business as a tool to address educational inequity and inequality of our country. Often, poverty and lack of economic self reliance is the biggest hurdle in the way of a families’ involvement in their child’s education. We believe if we can create sustainable social business experiments around both the advantaged and  disadvantaged families who send their kids to our  school, we achieve two things – restore the dignity of the economically disadvantaged  by enabling the entrepreneurship spirit in them and allowing them to earn the right to send their kids to  school, while sensitizing the well off kids and their families of the truth on the other side of the line and creating a cross ventilation of values, ethics and realizations in the society. In our unique model, we create a level playing field for all in a way which is sustainable while keeping intact the dignity of each individual or family associated with it.

You are an engineer, how you feel doing this and not what you studied for four years?

I have always seen engineering as a means to create something of enduring value for the society. In different ways, I am trying to do the same. You be an engineer or a doctor, a travel guide or a businessperson, a mathematician or a musician, if you think of each and every profession in the paradigm of service, as a thankful way of giving back to the part we owe to our existence in this world, we would be a better place.

Any message for the young Indian entrepreneur?

With around 600 million young people waiting for change to happen in India today, what more beautiful a concept can there be, than to fillip this completely renewable and assumingly inexhaustible source of youthful energy to create millions of nodes of changes in every gully, nukkad and crossroad of India. Just imagine. One Gandhi, multiplied six hundred million times. Crazy mathematics. That, is the power of “Be”ing the change

And lastly, I would leave you with a thought to reflect on. Someone once said, “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves – who am I to be brilliant, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world…”

For change to happen, you either wait to see, or you choose to Be! Take your pick.

Visit www.oneschoolforall.org and be a part of  the high performance community who believe excellent education and entrepreneurship have the power to change the world.

 

Surya Pratap Deka | OneSchoolForAll

If you want to be involved in the One school for all project, mail Surya at [email protected] or call him at +919762539809

Vist the website @ OneSchoolforall

P.S:

1. Those who think India needs a change can step up and join the team that knows no foul play and no cribbing but playing with all their hearts.

2. Those who think India needs a change and they can’t do anything about it can wait and see Deka & Company bring the change so that ‘their’ kids are born in a changed India.