Students from Agara and the villages surrounding it are usually up at the crack of dawn milking the cows or working in the fields. Then, they spend all day in school. When they get back from school in the afternoon, they must make use of all the daylight they have left to work in the fields. Finally, when it gets dark, they have little to no electricity to study or do their homework. As a result, they often have to use candles (which are extremely expensive) or kerosene lamps.
Pallavi, age 12, stands with students at Pet's Higher Primary School.
In July of 2016, Team LINC (Pallavi, Shreya, Purvi, Shweta, and Shivani) will be travelling to Agara, a small village in South India near the city of Bangalore. There, we will be donating 197 solar lights to students in grades 9-12. This is a continuation of a project started in 2012 by one of our members, Pallavi Rajan. She became a Global Ambassador for a nonprofit organization called One Million Lights when she was twelve years old, and donated 100 lanterns to various schools in Agara (see her story and her blog). This year, we want to continue that task by revisiting those same schools and gauging the impact that the lights had. In the future, we hope to donate a few tablets to the schools, as well as to provide them with steady internet connection.
Pallavi poses with her donation solar lights.