Forbes

FORBES ASIA

SAMPARK FOUNDATION

82 | FORBES ASIA JUNE 2013

Vineet and Anupama Nayar are betting

$100 million that their low-tech tools will

get students to learn in India’s notoriously

ineffective rural schools.

BY ANURADHA RAGHUNATHAN

Teach

the Children

A

big part of the solution
to getting young children
to learn math in the
poorest, most educa-
tionally backward parts
of the world may be just simple items
such as colored rings on strings, plastic
blocks of different sizes and multihued
circles, triangles and squares. “The
kids take a lot of interest when we use
these things. They don’t see it as work
then,” says Revati Mathyal, a teacher in
a northern India school who’s working
with a class of 16 students in a mix of
grades one through five. “When we use
traditional methods of teaching math it
takes time for them to understand. This
is all so colorful and attractive.”
The strategy seems to be work-
ing. Before it was adopted only 41% of
second-grade students surveyed in Ut-
tarakhand, the Himalayan state where
the school is located, could do simple

addition. This has now risen to 91%.

Similarly, the share of students who

can do simple subtraction jumped from

33% to 89%; for multiplication it went

from 25% to 83%; and for division, 15%

to 73%.

Vineet Nayar, a former vice chair-

man and chief executive of the informa-

tion-technology giant HCL Technolo-

gies, and his wife, Anupama, are behind

this effort. Their New Delhi-based

Sampark Foundation is rolling out kits

with these child-friendly teaching aids

to 50,000 government schools and 3

million students across Uttarakhand

and another poor state southeast of

there, Chhattisgarh. (A smaller-scale

program is also afoot in Jammu and

Kashmir.) The kits cover 23 basic math

concepts.

Sampark is also training 100,000

teachers in government schools to use

the aids. And it plans to add 100,000 ATUL LOKE FOR FORBES

82 | FORBES ASIA JULY 2016

Man of his word:

“I want to be at the

center of innovation,”

says Vineet Nayar.