Kailash Satyarthi - As A Young Philanthropist

As A Young Philanthropist

As an eleven year old child, Kailash was deeply moved by the condition of children who were not privileged enough to attend school and therefore he adopted a two pronged approach for helping such children.

(a) Public schooling was not free during those days. With the help of a few like-minded friends, he started a football club for raising money for the children who were unable to attend school. The membership fee collected thereof was donated to support the school fees of few of such children. In subsequent years Kailash and his friends went ahead and put up snack stalls in fetes and fairs and were able to raise more money towards schools fees of underprivileged children.

(b) Soon Kailash realised that the major problem that was being faced by such children was their inability to afford school books. This used to leave him extremely perturbed as many children were forced to drop-out from school. He along with one of his friends Ramesh Vyas decided to do something about it. In Vidisha (Kailash’s home-town in Madhya Pradesh), results of all classes in all schools used to be declared on 30 April every year. He and his friend hired a pushcart. While Kailash chose to stand on the cart, his friend Ramesh volunteered in pushing it through the narrow lanes of the locality. Yelling on top of their voices, they started congratulating the students for passing the examinations. This immediately caught the attention of people around. When they saw enough people coming out of their houses, they exclaimed “ You all are so lucky that your children have been promoted to the next class, but think about those children who do not even get an opportunity to attend school just because they cannot afford school books. Old books are of no use to you and sooner than later you would sell them off at throwaway prices. Your old books can light up the prospects of underprivileged children to attend school who were unable to do so all this while. Think how grateful would they and their parents be to you for the rest of their lives”. This actually worked and the response was overwhelming. People brought out heaps of old books and donated them to Kailash and his friend. They started arranging the books on the cart. Soon the cart was flooded with old books; therefore they dumped the books at Ramesh’s house and were back on the street to collect more books that people were voluntarily donating. That day they were able to collect almost 2000 books. Kailash’s parents were not aware of the initiative that he had undertaken. Therefore he decided to stack the books at his friend’s house. When both the boys started sorting the books they realized that the books ranged from school syllabi to that of post graduation. The two of them were utterly confused as to what should be done with the books and how should the needy be identified? After all they were merely 11 years old. They approached their headmaster and sought his help. The Headmaster got the books sorted out. He also accepted the responsibility of distributing the books to the truly deserving students who were in much need. Subsequently they thought that if all the books are given away then they would get back to square one at the beginning of next academic session. Therefore Kailash requested his Headmaster if he could assume the responsibility of distributing the books to the needy at the beginning of the session and collect them back when the session draws to an end. Not only did his headmaster gladly offer to help, but he also spoke to the headmasters and principals of other middle and high schools. They also joined in and arranged for more books. They got involved in identifying needy children and distributing the text books to them. Thus came in the concept of Book Bank which was a sustainable and replicable model to provide school books to the children who couldn’t afford them. Headmasters and principals of quite a few schools in Vidisha took keen interest in managing the activities of the book bank for years that followed. Subsequently the book bank was merged with public libraries in the town.