Reach India Foundation

Miles to go... We are a team of two guys – Mayank Khewaria and Nishanth Naik – from IIT Gandhinagar, Gujarat and we have travelled across the country on the theme - Education in India. We took up a fellowship after our final year as we wanted to experience the world outside the institute before we enter our professional life. So we travelled across 10 states of the country in search of schools, institutes, NGOs and individuals working on primary education. The trip lasted for 42 days and we have gained a lot of insights on our theme and the cross cultural differences within India. We started with this theme as we saw a deficit of quality education in the primary level and we wanted to get an experience of reality and also look for the changes that are coming up. A group picture for posterity. L-R: Mayank, Janakiraman, Nishant As a part of our trip, we headed to Mananthavady on June 13 2017 and reached there by 2 pm. We got to know about Reach India Foundation through

Ants, Trees and me. I had nothing in my mind before reaching Reach India Foundation. I started my exploration  from Mysore – Manathavathy  bus journey. In that journey, I saw isolated communities in the forest with sustainable life style.It was my first observation part in this journey. I am from Tamil Nadu so I don’t know Malayalam language but I met more Tamil speaking people in the field. I learnt few Malayalam words. It helped me to engage with people in the field. My representation of the field. In a new place, initially, I made my friendship with ants and trees. They were my listeners for the first week. I explored few wards in the Thondarnad panchayat to understand the locality and social structure. In my exploration I observed people’s livelihood, lifestyle, sustainable living and agriculture. The exploration part of my first week made me realise that exploration by foot is important and it is the only way to understand deeper about the society. I learnt