Diksha’s work revolve around three themes:

In the second decade of our KHEL centers, we will focus on creating our Centres as model learning centres for Bihar. We plan to introduce new teaching-learning methods to make our center inclusive and democratic. The annual outreach of the center will be expanded to 550 children and youth per year. We will create a balance between our programs for youth and children, as many of our alumni would need guidance as they become young adults. Our centres currently work out of small rented premises; we will be raising resources to build eco-friendly KHEL center equipped with modern technology as well as sustainable architecture elements. Total annual outreach of 3500 children in the period 2020-2027.

Diksha’s approach to education has an active component of responsibility towards the community and the larger society. In 2019, we actively engaged youth from colleges and slum communities to spread awareness on health, hygiene, and safety issues. We plan to further our community work with projects that help youth and children living in low-income settlements. By 2027 we plan to cover 20 major slum communities of Patna under our public education and awareness campaigns.

To fulfil Diksha’s agenda of holistic education, it is imperative to develop school leadership and formulate whole-school programs. Diksha worked with SRB Alok School, Gangagarh Village, Bulandshahr, in a multi-year project from 2010 to 2016. The learning from that project and experience from Diksha’s learning centres would be used to design a school improvement program. Schools as Learning Organizations framework developed by Peter Senge, MIT, USA, and Leadership for Learning framework developed by John Macbeath, Cambridge University, UK, will be evaluated as

India’s IT industry makes a significant contribution to the Gross Domestic Product of the country. However, Bihar did not benefit directly from the IT revolution. Our interest is helping our students becoming digitally empowered so that they become creators of technology. We will set up ten maker-spaces in Bihar where the child would learn fabrication, the Internet of Things, and associated concepts using Raspberry Pi computer. We will use the Code Club modules developed by the Raspberry Pi Foundation for this initiative. The government of India has supported the establishment of ATL Tinkering Labs in schools; we recently conducted life skill sessions in schools running ATL Lab in Bihar.

Most schools lack the basic infrastructure necessary to make them accessible to physically disabled students, mental disability is misunderstood, and the state as a whole has virtually no expertise in addressing learning disabilities. Given this context, we have initiated Project Alive- an inclusive education project, our goal is that each student should be treated fairly and equally by the teachers. The Index for Inclusion is a manual developed by Prof Tony Booth, Cambridge University, UK and Mel Ainscow, University of Manchester, UK. The Index helps in creating inclusive skills through dialogue and capacity building of teachers. The targeted outreach for Index is 35 schools by 2027.

Diksha has been a member of the Honey Bee Network since 2011. We are fortunate to have Prof Anil Gupta, Founder, Honey Bee Network and Faculty, Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, as our Mentor. From 2011 to 2018, we reached out to over 60000 children organizing Ignite creativity contests in schools of different districts in Bihar. In the next phase, we plan to redesign the Ignite initiative to set up innovation clubs in schools, organizing workshops, and training for 14000 children in the next seven years.