Ekal Vidyalaya South Florida Chapter Hits the Million Dollar Mark

The South Florida chapter of the Ekal Vidyalaya Foundation has diligently worked for nearly thirteen years to raise a million dollars to help educate children in remote tribal and rural areas of India. If not for the presence of Ekal Vidyalayas, these children would never have access to education.

“It is wonderful to see the kindness and compassion of the citizens of South Florida who have opened their hearts and their wallets to bring education to nearly 300,000 children who would have otherwise had no access to literacy,” says Mr. Jagdish Tailor, President of the South Florida Chapter. He is ably assisted by Nirupama Kasam and Shalin Mishra. Rittu Linhart, Naresh Tolani, and Dr. Subbarayan R. Pochi are past presidents who worked hard to reach this milestone. Abha Narang is the RICE (Removing Illiteracy by Collective Education) coordinator. Brahm Ratan Agarwal, Dilip Kothekar, Dr. Jay Mulaney, Dr. Sudhir Prabhu, Shekar Reddy and Chandresh Saraiya serve on the board of advisors for the Florida Region.

Ekal Vidyalaya is an organization that runs single teacher schools in remote tribal and rural areas of India. The school is used as a nucleus to bring about holistic transformation of the village. Since 2000, the Ekal movement has grown leaps and bounds. From 4,882 schools in 2000, it has now reached almost 52,000 schools, teaching nearly 1.5 million children with a presence in all Indian states including Jammu and Kashmir. The organization does all this for the low cost of just a dollar a day. It costs only $365 to support a single school with nearly 30-40 children for a whole year. To learn more about this great movement, please check out the website at www.ekal.org.