Pradeep Lokhande, Pune – 411013. For the last 15 years, this one-line address has been enough to deliver thousands of postcards from across 10 states of India to this 54-year-old social entrepreneur and founder of Rural Relations, who is revolutionising the way students in rural India read and react.
Lokhande has been setting up libraries in secondary schools across villages as part of his Gyan-Key initiative since 2010. It’s a unique library for students and by students; each library is managed by a girl student, who is the Gyan-Key monitor. This has been touted as the world’s largest rural reading initiative. Sitting at his modest Wanowrie office reading postcards, Lokhande shared, “Till date, we have received 1,00,750 postcards and donors have got 1,10,650, all with the students’ reactions on books they have read. We aim to open three Gyan-Key libraries every working day. The target is 94,000 Gyan-Key libraries in rural secondary schools across India.”
Lokhande hails from Wai in Satara district. A commerce graduate from Ness Wadia College, he studied diploma in marketing from the Institute of Management Development and Research (IMDR), Pune and worked for 18 months with Johnson & Johnson, which had him travel across villages in Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Maharashtra. But, hometown Wai remained close to his heart. He believes every Indian living in the city or abroad is a Non-Resident Villager (NRV). Till date, with the help of NRVs, 3,640 Gyan-Key libraries have been established in rural secondary schools within 1,390 working days, benefitting more than 8.5 lakh students. Each library has a minimum of 180-200 books on various subjects. About 6,25,000 books have been collectively distributed to these libraries, worth a total of Rs 1.56 crore.
These are primary books on subjects like disaster management, time management, physical training, sex education, Indian Constitution, drama, music, civics and so on, all in local languages. Each library benefits around 270 rural students of four to eight adjoining villages. Lokhande is regularly invited by the Indian Institutes of Management and other management schools across the globe to talk about practical marketing strategies. He realised his penchant for rural development during the liberalisation boom of the early ’90s, set up Rural Relations — which essentially collects data on the rural consumer populace — in 1996 and began his market research. Rural socio-economic conditions like the number of shops in a village, the sarpanch’s name, the number of television sets, whether the village has internet connectivity or not and so on were collated by him and his team. Lokhande claims to have personally visited about 5,800 villages across the country.
It was in 2001-02 that he decided to develop villages with the help of NRVs. The first thing he did was to get used computers from individuals and companies in cities and install them in village schools. “Till 2009, we had installed 28,000 computers at 20,000 villages in Maharashtra, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Chhatisgarh, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. Now, we either purchase new computers or get them from IT companies who discard them after three years,” he offered.
In a few more years, the library project took seed. “When a child reaches the fifth standard he/she wants to study. We want to facilitate this reading habit for wholesome personality growth among rural kids,” said Lokhande, explaining the drill, “At present, the cost of establishing a library is Rs 6,700 per school. We get donors to draw cheques in the name of book publishers/distributors, who transport the books. Then, we train the students on how to manage the libraries. The students are also given postcards to send their feedback to me and the donors periodically.”
His most recent game changer is villagewiKY, an open information platform of key and feeder villages in India. This enables a deep understanding of village dynamics by ecography, sociaography, geography, demography, professionals and institutes. The data is being uploaded on their website for everyone to access and do something for the villages.
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