Project Students Education and Entrepreneurship Development (SEED): A move towards making Indian youth better

Project Students Education and Entrepreneurship Development (SEED) embarked upon year 1997 seeks to support student beneficiaries from malnutrition and poverty hit tribal areas of Melghat in Amravati district and Dahanu/Jawhar block of Thane (former Palghar) district of Maharashtra at the BJS established Wagholi Educational Rehabilitation Centre (WERC) in Pune. For long, tribal regions in India have been the foreground for socio economic backwardness. Despite the several measures to bring about a change in the lives of tribal population, the problems have continued to persist. 

BJS realized that a long term, consistent, and systematic approach is what is required to resolve the unflinching crisis. This program offers to bring about a change in the tribal regions through educating their children. The overall goal of the project is to educate and capacitate the children of tribal regions to transform them to become the 'change agents' of their own community. It will be a long time taking process, but the beginning of this change shall start with mainstream school education of the children of these regions.

The project is thus conceived with dual aim of providing children with appropriate opportunity and facilitating them to pursue education (from standard V onwards) and secondly, empowering them as self-sustaining citizens capable of contributing to holistic development of their own community.

From the time of commencement of this project every year a group of students are selected for standard V. After transferring them to BJS WERC they are enrolled for free of cost education at BJS Wagholi. The program undertakes a set of planned and structured interventions that comprised provision of quality education and co-curricular development, enabling and hygienic boarding and lodging facilities, nutritious meals, medical assistance and insurance and healthy psychosocial environment. The BJS WERC is well equipped with infrastructure facilities, training staff and administrative systems to track and monitor the performance of each unit of the centre. 

Even though local schools are present in tribal regions, BJS decided to adopt a different approach to educate these children by shifting them to BJS WERC to provide the exposure advanced educational and social tools to strengthen their inherit abilities, build their confidence to make them realize that they are competent as other children. BJS WERC focuses in enrolling children from standard V onwards because experience shows children are better prepared to stay independently away from family after attaining a certain age. They also begin to understand the significance of education by this age.