Double Century of Parivaar Seva Kutirs – Founder’s Letter

Double Century of Parivaar Seva Kutirs – Founder’s Letter
Friends, we are delighted to share that we now have 207 Seva Kutir centres in as many villages in selected tribal blocks in 6 districts of MP. Each of the centres has on an average around 100 children in age group of 3 to 14 and undergo 6 hours of education, life skills, and overall development. Thus, around 20 thousand children are receiving meals twice a day. Besides this, the Seva Kutir platform with 1100 fulltime field workers, cluster coordinators, resource persons, district anchors, educationists, teachers, cooks and volunteers – predominantly from the local communiies – also enables us in many other activities related to general development and service in these villages. The districts where we operate are Sheopur (51 villages), Mandla (28 villages), Dewas (49 villages), Sehore (43 villages), Khandwa (18 villages), and Chhindwara (18 villages). The local panchayats, block and district administrations remain in close touch with us. We also help in enhancing delivery in local govt schools in each of these villages. Our children also attend the local govt school as the timings of the Seva Kutirs exactly complement the timings of the govt school.
One can see
Parivaar.org
Recently the state goverment has offered to us to take over many of residential schools and hostels in areas where we operate – an offer we are thinking over as to how best to go about.
This whole work has happened in last 3 years. Parivaar started in 2003 and till 2017 it was limited to Bengal where, starting in a rented building with 3 desitute children from a village near Amtala off the diamond harbour road, it scaled to 2 free residential educational institutions having more than 2000 resident children (one campus each for boys and girls). In 2016 we purchased a small piece of land on banks of Narmada in MP, and about 17 acres to build a residential campus for destitute and tribal children on lines of our Bengal institution. Since a residential campus takes time to build and scale it occurred to me to start a couple of centres in tribal villages for field engagement needed for the residential campus in future. These centres were called Seva Kutirs. Scarcely did I know that the Seva Kutirs would become quite a grand program in itself. In 2017 we set up 2 seva kutir, 100 in 2018, 48 in 2019, and even after June as the country witnessed lockdown we have set up more than 50 new centres. In last 2 months we have set up 38 new centres.
The Seva Kutir model has been taken well by our supporters too. Three fourths of our funding is from individual supporters, only a quarter from corporate CSR, out of about Rs 30 Cr.
The coming years will witness not just expansion of seva kutirs in numbers but many more dimensions than the core delivery will be added to the seva kutir platform. Also we look forward to setting up newer centres in districts of Barwani in the Shoolpani Jhaari area, in Baiga villages of Dindori and Anuppur districts and in Dhar, Alirajpur, and Jhabua districts.
Parivaar is driven by austerity and less than 16 persons out of total 1300 in MP and Bengal are remunerated more than Rs 20 thousand monthly. Only 3 more than Rs 30 thousand, and none more than 50 thousand. We make one penny go a very long way with highest efficiency.
The scale it has reached is because of contribution of a very large number of our sevavratees and trust reposed in us by our supporters and wellwishers. No words of gratitude can be enough for them. By 2024 Parivaar is on road to have at least 500 Seva Kutirs serving 50 thousand children and multiple resident schools and institutions having a total capacity of 10 thousand. We seek blessings from all of you that we continue to do this work untainted by pride, self-importance, and with total fairness and highest empathy for all the less privileged, who only have given meaning to our lives.