Partners

According to the All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) 2021-2022 released by The Government of India’s Ministry of Education, of the 4.33 crore students enrolled in higher education in 2021-22, only 15.3% belong to Scheduled Caste, 6.3% belong to Scheduled Tribe, 37.8% are from Other Backward Class and remaining 40.6% students are from other communities. Their comprehensive services aim to empower students by providing tailored workshops, personalised mentoring, and expert coaching, fostering their pursuit of quality higher education and fulfilling career pathways.

Eklavya was established in 2017 and has impacted 1200 students from marginalised communities who have secured admission to 80+ national and international universities and 400 alumni who have been empowered with employment and serve as community role models. They have also been able to address the dropout rate and retain the students, provide linguistic support, and improve their proficiency in grade-level learning outcomes. The founders of Eklavya are Raju Kendre, Prashant Chavan, Smita Tatewar, and Akash Modak who have been working in the development sector for 4-5 years and have lived experience of caste-based discrimination. They are conducting a study with a TISS faculty on various mechanisms available in Universities for students, best practices in institutions, and ways to make existing SC/ST cells inclusive in the long run.

Project with MHI:

Eklavya runs a residential resource centre called Satyashodhak Residential Youth Resource Centre in Nagpur to address the barrier to accessing quality higher education among marginalised youth. Every year the teachers conduct training and capacity-building activities for at least 800 marginalised youth through their short-term residential training program. They train 180 students in three batches 60 students in each through 3 months of training programs - undergraduate program for students who have finished 12th standard, postgraduation program for students who have completed undergraduate, and global scholar program which is for students who want to go abroad for their masters. They conduct residential career counselling and sensitisation workshops with 520 students every year. Eklavya reaches out to students from marginalised communities, mostly from rural and tribal belts of Maharashtra. During the transition to higher education, students face various challenges of mental health such as cultural shock, identity-based discrimination and inferiority complex among others. Due to this, they experience mental stress which affects their learning outcomes and further leads to dropouts. Eklavya plans to train the facilitators of their peer support programs in various universities as a direct intervention. Eklavya also aims to design an anti-caste philosophy curriculum that includes a perspective on caste discrimination, and violation of rights, which they would like to include in their curriculum in a structured way. Eklavya will organise in-person workshops on diverse topics like introduction to different career fields, scholarships, soft skills, gender sensitisation and caste consciousness which various resource persons from the fields will conduct.