The Growing Impact of IIMPACT

Last year, when 11-year-old Rubina Bano finished her fifth standard at a primary school set in a thatched mud house near a community well in Mahuakhurd, a village in Rajasthan’s Alwar district, she topped her class and delighted her father, a vegetable seller. Meanwhile, Rubina’s completing her primary education was one more feather in the cap for a handful of people who are unrelated to her: 59-year-old Gurgaon businessman Anil Tandon and a small group of fellow IIM Ahmedabad graduates, all from the class of 1978.

“When I grow up, I want to become a teacher,” says Rubina. That’s the kind of new-found aspirations expressed by about 17,000 little girls like her from as many as 560 locations in rural India, whose lives Tandon and his classmates have touched through IIMPACT, a charitable trust they set up just eight years ago.

It all began at a fun-filled alumni meeting in December 2002. Amid the backslapping and nostalgia, the three-day reunion proved to be different for several people from that class of 1978. “We’ve all achieved so much,” Anil Tandon told his classmates. “Now it’s our turn to give something back to society.” That led to a discussion on the meeting’s last day, when a group of about 20 from the 100 or so alumni gathered there began to ideate. 

Back home, Tandon and his classmate Biswajit Sen, who had helped establish several NGOs, e-mailed about 50 of their fellow IIM alumni, exhorting them to take up a social cause. They got some replies and so, in February 2003, nine of them met at a Gurgaon club. There Krishan Dhawan, the current president of IIMPACT, quoted the Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen, who considers female literacy a true indicator and enabler of development. “That’s when IIMPACT’s focus took shape,” explains Tandon.

For countless underprivileged girls in rural India, education is among the last things their folks care about. The daily lives of these children revolve around performing household chores or attending to their livestock. Many of them get married without learning to read, but thanks to IIMPACT, Rubina and thousands of others now have a fair chance of escaping such a bleak future.

Visiting remote Rajasthani villages, where Biswajit Sen knew of Ibtada, an NGO that promotes literacy among children, the friends who formed IIMPACT decided to open 20 primary schools—or “learning centres”—in the villages of Alwar. Every centre was to have a teacher and about 30 girl students. They would be run at low cost with locally available resources—a practical approach—yet provide quality primary education to girls.

The cost of running 20 centres worked out to about Rs12 lakhs annually. Since the money had to come year after year, they wondered how they’d fund it. They’d seek sponsors, and friends would chip in. But what if they’d have to shut shop for lack of funds? That’s when Tandon’s business partner, Gautam Nair, made an offer: If they failed to find enough sponsors, any shortfall would be covered from their own business earnings. Tandon agreed. 

By the end of 2003, the first 20 learning centres had been established in premises made available by village panchayats, thanks to help from Ibtada. “It was tough convin-cing some village elders to give us a place,” recalls Nirmala Tandon, Anil’s wife, who quit her teaching job at a Delhi school to volunteer fulltime. “They were suspicious and wondered why we city folk would want to teach their girls for free.” 

In Alwar's predominantly Muslim population, many parents were opposed to the idea of sending their daughters, especially if they were already attending a religious madrassa. “So we asked the parents to sit in the classrooms to experience firsthand what we teach,” says Nirmala. “Some of them did and, gradually, their opposition faded.”

One group that still felt threatened by IIMPACT’s learning centres comprised the maulvis who taught at the madrassas. Within two years of their opening, six Alwar centres had to be closed due to their stiff opposition. But not for long—it was the mothers of the children who insisted they wanted their girls