City Pulse

Class 7 students of Elite English High School are finishing the first draft of a project, titled “Local Action.” The group took up the issue of waste management in their apartment complex in JP Nagar and assembled a plan which outlines the approach of using decentralised community composters. This idea is a part of the civic activity-learning based collaborative project run by the school management and Bala Janaagraha.

For the last 16 years, Bala Janaagraha’s mission has been to help schools work towards building a democratic culture by developing student citizenship. They believe that schools, curriculums, and various teaching and learning methods can help imbibe citizenship for life. To address and respond to this mission, Bala Janaagraha works by interconnecting standardised lesson plans, activity-based learning, and an open civic project which engages with public issues. The program works with various partners at a local and national level and combines creative ways to help the youth become active citizens.

Bala Janaagraha believes that the intersection of lesson plans and activity-based learning can bring about change at a systemic level in nurturing a democratic and participative culture of citizenship. There has been a continued focus on enabling learning through hands-on, experiential youth-centered education, beyond the four walls of the classroom. Youth are encouraged to use dialogue and negotiation rather than debate, reiterating that the collective is as vital as the individual. Their lesson plans turn traditional civic education upside down, helping youth learn about democracy by ‘being in action’.  

Relying on the curriculum is one way, but more importantly, Bala Janaagraha with schools ensures the development of strong student participation and involvement by city administrators to help champion the student’s vision. One such example is when the youth from a school in Patna attempted to meet their local authority 38 times to resolve an abysmal road condition in their locality. When they couldn’t meet the Corporator or the MLA, they reached out to the then CM, Nitish Kumar who visited the road and immediately granted 60 crores for the development of the same.

Bala Janaagraha has enabled schools to reinvigorate civic education by creating a symbiotic relationship between knowledge and experiential learning. Together, they are playing a vital role in nurturing more informed, curious, and engaged youth who will help our governments tackle and solve significant public issues in the future. Bala Janaagraha works with a sense of urgency, yet, recognises that a sustained investment over time will bring about considerable change enabling the youth of today to become change-makers of tomorrow.

The programme began engaging with five schools in a single ward in Bangalore. Today, it has scaled to over 26 cities across the country. Bala Janaagraha engages with over 3,80,000 youth across Grades 6^th – 10^th in 600+ schools across the country., In the last four years, youth associated with Bala Janaagraha, have worked on over 25,000 local issues concerning their community.

Prarthana says it is not significant enough to be written about. Optionally we can say -  The program works at a local and national level and combines creative ways to help the youth become active citizens.