Dr. Balaji Sampath - one of the guiding lights of the Eureka Child project

Read about Dr. Balaji Sampath on Ashoka International website: http://www.ashoka.org/balaji
Dr. Balaji Sampath and his works: http://www.ashoka.org/node/3629
Dr.Balaji Sampath - winner of MIT Global Indus Technovators award: http://technovators.mit.edu/gita/2005_winners_grassroots.html

A talk by Dr. Balaji at UC Berkeley: http://www.veoh.com/userChannels.html?username=rabinpatra

Dr. Balaji Sampath is an AID Jeevan Saathi (Fellow). He has been actively involved in bringing about large scale changes in primary education and healthcare since 1997. He is a recipient of numerous awards including the Ashoka Fellowship for social entrepreneurship and the MIT Technovator of the Year Award. AID India's work has been supported by many leading organizations, such as UNICEF, Pratham etc.

Brief biography of Dr. Balaji Sampath:

Because his parents were often transferred to different locations for their government jobs, as a child Balaji was exposed to a number of schools across the country. In all these schools, one thing remained constant: his problem understanding scientific subjects because of ineffective teaching. Balaji’s family encouraged him to question the situation, and very early in life he devised his own system of analysis and arriving at solutions.

India’s problems, especially the riots of 1992, affected Balaji deeply, making him realize that he wanted to work for the public good. He became convinced that there cannot be any movement without volunteers. While a student at the Indian Institute of Technology in Chennai, he started volunteering in a small nearby village, coaching children in various subjects, especially mathematics and science. The village volunteer group he created in order to help him with his work was motivated enough to raise the money to start proper tutoring centers.

Higher studies took Balaji to the United States, where he started organizing fellow students and friends to raise funds for citizen sector organizations in India—knowing that such fundraising would help him start his community work once he returned to India. An initial group of 400 swelled to 1,000 and then more, evolving into chapters of AID-India across the world, which support more than 200 projects. Between 1995 and 1996, he helped mobilize considerable funds through this channel for a number of citizen sector organizations in India. He also works closely with “Asha for Education,” an organization of immigrant Indians in the United States who support significant educational initiatives in India, including the work of some Ashoka Fellows.

Balaji returned to India after a doctorate in electronics and communication engineering from the University of Maryland and lived in villages to learn how best he could help upgrade the education system and create a level playing field for rural children. Having spent years trying to understand the basics of science, he naturally turned to this topic for his current work.

Dr. Balaji Sampath and Science education in India

While some elite schools in urban India are trying to change the way science is taught through expensively equipped labs and well-trained teachers, most rural government schools continue to suffer from rote memorization techniques. To counter this methodology, Balaji Sampath is introducing “Science Dialogues” into middle and high schools through a “reach-and-teach” strategy uses simple teaching techniques of dialogues and experiments that bring materials to life and helps students internalize concepts far better. After developing his materials, Balaji created a program to train volunteers to disseminate and demonstrate his techniques and the use of his materials in schools. Balaji uses a volunteer base of rural young people, most of them high school dropouts, to spread his Eureka Science Experiment Kit — a collection of 300 low-cost experiments. In effect a mobile lab, the Eureka Kit, along with a training manual for teachers, is offered to schools at a minimal cost of Rs 5,000 (US$120). By overhauling the framework of traditional teaching techniques and materials, Balaji is forming a whole new generation of thinkers who can apply well-understood, progressive principles to all aspects of life and become catalysts in the advancement and development Indian society.