Be Like Them

"Catching the latest movie or gadget and hanging out with friends in cool cafes with an occasional study hour thrown in, pretty much summarises the weekend schedule of high school teenagers"

1. This is not so for Basanagouda Patil, Prabhu Suresh and Aditya Dev Gupta — three students pursuing their International Baccalaureate Diploma at The International School, Bangalore (TISB). They prefer to pack their bags and head for the slums during weekends to teach their less privileged counterparts computer science through the initiative IT4ALL.
2. At present, they cater to about 40 students but want to take the figure to 500. This, they say, will only be possible with help from voluntary teachers and sponsors. 
3. When the trio entered the prestigious TISB, computers was a part of their curriculum. But they soon realised that for students from the slums, IT was a far cry. Deciding to bridge this disparity, they stared IT4ALL. “With the help of the NGO World Vision, we started the project a year ago to make IT and computers accessible to students from the slums. 
4. World Vision set up community centres in the slums of Koramangala, Ramamurthynagar and Yeshwanthpur. These centres were then fitted with computers, some of which were donated by my father and some by his company,” said 16-year-old Patil. The centres have about four to five computers each, but the students could definitely do with a few more. 
5. “We have made appeals to various IT companies to chip in. But obviously, there is some hesitation as they feel that this might not be a credible process. So we are trying to create awareness about this project,” added Patil, a Koramangala resident.