Ajay Piramal, through the Piramal Foundation, is practising what he preaches about the need for the privileged to 'share'
As Pratap Singh’s voice booms through the phone, it is easy to imagine him as the stereotypical school headmaster walking around with a stick in hand and children scattering like chicken at the first glimpse of the ‘big bad wolf’. And that may well have been the case till sometime ago. But for the past three years, the headmaster of the Rajkiya Balika Uchh Prathamik Vidyalay, a government girls’ school in the Churu district of Rajasthan, would like to believe things have changed.
“If I think of myself as a government servant and that this is a government school and that I can’t do anything differently, then that would be negative thinking,” says the 53-year-old. Instead, he has been trying to engage with students and teachers in a manner that is accessible and friendly. “I have to see things from their perspective,” Singh says. He has introduced up to 20 different kinds of ‘activities’ that have made teaching and studying more enjoyable in the school.
They framed the content for this process with the help of IIM-A’s Sharma, his colleague Neharika Vohra, and Bodh Shiksha Samiti in Jaipur, an organisation that specialises in training teachers. The training was divided into four parts: Personal, instructional (with respect to students), organisational (with respect to fellow teachers) and social (with respect to the larger community).
(This story appears in the 21 March, 2014 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)