"The India NGO 2010 awards were given to five NGOs for adopting good standards and practices while implementing their programmes on 5 August at the India Habitat Centre in New Delhi...The Pardada Pardadi Educational Society (PPES) won the award under the medium-scale category."
"Lunch is about to begin at the Pardada Pardadi Education Society (PPES) school in Anupshahr, a village some 40 km from Bulandshahar in west Uttar Pradesh (UP). Students on kitchen duty lay out hundreds of steel plates in long, neat rows for the midday meal."
"When Sam Singh walked into his ancestral village, three and half hours outside Delhi, declaring he was going to build a school for girls, noone believed him. There were few educational opportunities for women in the rural community that his family was from."
"Talking about some of her other initiatives, Raman informs, I am involved with Pardada Pardadi Educational Society (PPES), an organisation that works for empowerment of rural women in the remote Bulandshahr district of Uttar Pradesh. Together, we impart vocational training. We teach craft work to young girls and empower them to earn their own livelihood."
"Singh may have realised his long-cherished dream of empowering the girl child, but he is far from being a happy man. 'In solving one problem, we have created another,' says Singh, adding, 'The girls feel they are too educated for the village boys. But, these girls have to continue living in their social milieu, in the same village where their pardada-pardadi (ancestors) have resided.'"
"Two young women awoke early on an October morning, exhausted from a day of travel, and looked out the window at impenetrable fog. For Sarita Chaudhary, age 17, and Kumkum Chauhan, age 20, it must have been daunting to get no glimpse of the landscape. For the first time in their lives, the women were outside their rural village of Anoopshahr, in the northern state of India called Uttar Pradesh. Beyond the fog outside was a world they'd travelled by bus and plane and car to reach, a place as unfamiliar as possible from their dusty, agrarian home: America, California, the Santa Cruz Mountains."
"We recently met a girl who was married at thirteen. We heard the first half of her story while driving out to rural Uttar Pradesh, four hours east of New Delhi, with Sam Singh, founder of the Pardada Pardadi School for Girls. One day four years ago, Sam told us, he arrived at his school to discover his students and faculty buzzing with rumor: Ruksana was getting married. Thirteen-year-old Ruksana."
Educate the girl child and you would educate the whole family. Virender Singh strongly believes that empowering the girl child positively affects the quality of life of the community and ultimately the entire nation.
"It is an unusual meeting point. India's ace fashion designers rubbing shoulders with a group of girls from a small Uttar Pradesh town at the Wills India Fashion Week here. These girls from Anoopshahr belong to the Pardada Pardadi Educational Society (PPSE), a non-profit organisation, which has set up a stall in the exhibition area to showcase their bed, bath lines and gift item range."
"The monkeys she sees every evening are now part of Meena's own story book. She, like her other friends, are now writing, and illustrating, their own stories. Artist and educator Rikki Asher brings you a heartwarming account of her time at the Pardada Pardadi school."
"To get a sense of how far Virendra (Sam) Singh has come and how far he still has to go, it might help to begin this story with his family tree.
Names spanning eight generations of these former zamindars (feudal landlords) are painted on a wall inside a family compound in this village, which is surrounded by acres and acres of sugar cane fields and is 3.5km away from the nearest main road."
"A dust-laden village in Uttar Pradesh that seemed condemned to its banality and masculine feudalism. Not too many outsiders knew of this village, not too many dreams grew within its confines."
"It was her first visit outside Anupshahr, UP, but on being asked about her impression of the US, pat came Asha's reply: 'I noticed that men and
women equally divide the household chores right from cleaning the house to looking after the baby'. "
"It helps disadvantaged girls from rural areas to stand on their own feet with their heads held high. And now Pardada Pardadi Educational Society (PPES) that works at Anupshahr in Bulandshahr district has earned a unique distinction as ten of its girl students -- who come from a background where child marriage, child labour and exploitation of girls are part and parcel of daily life -- have got first division in the Class X Uttar Pradesh Board examinations this year."
"The whirr of old fashioned sewing machines reverberates in the high-ceilinged room. Forty girls dressed in uniform green and yellow salwar kameez bend their heads towards their stitching as shafts of afternoon sunlight warm their identical hairstyles of black looped braids."
"Sam Singh lived the American dream, climbing the corporate ladder to the top ranks of DuPont Corporation. He wanted to do more, however, and decided that he should build a school for poor girls in his ancestral home in northern India."
"Neeru Sharma, 12, has a polio-related disability. The government school she studied at threw her out, unwilling to cope with her disability. Today, she studies at the Pardada-Pardadi Girls Vocational School (PPGVS), is in Class VI and juggles her lessons with computer sessions and vocational training, which earns money for her family. Teenage siblings Aarti, Pooja and Jyoti were rescued from their abusive alcoholic father's custody by a local NGO. Their mother, Hemvati, resolute about educating them, enrolled them in PPGVS. The girls know they have been given a new lease of life."
"I had written about the saas bahu sammelan a while ago. Now read about the Pardada Pardadi Educational Society, an educational progam based in Anoopshahar in the Bulandshahar district of Uttar Pradesh. The PPES opted for a unique approach of education through academic, value-based, and skill-based education allows PPGVS to address the interrelated issues of poverty, gender-bias, and education in India. At present PPES working with girls from 46 villages of Anoopshahar in Uttar Pradesh."
