March 2022: Laying the foundation for the first building
Post the pandemic years, Sri M visited the Chanda Satsang Vidyalaya at Garh Mukteshwar’s Lathira village in March 2022 to lay the foundation stone of its own building to house the fast-expanding number of students, most of them first generation learners. Along with the foundation stone, he planted a peepul tree.
January 2026: Inauguration of the new school building
Exactly three years and 10 months later, the peepul tree forms the center of a beautifully designed circular building which melds into the surrounding fields, becoming part of the village landscape. On 14 January 2026, the auspicious occasion of Makar Sankranti when the sun begins to move northwards towards warmth and light, Sri M and Smt. Sunanda Ali inaugurated the building in the presence of many distinguished guests, the students, staff, and volunteers of The Satsang Foundation, Delhi Kendra who help with the running of the school.
Sri M said he hoped the school would grow into a renowned learning center like the forest academies of old, even as he named the Head Master’s cottage Nalanda to commemorate the ancient Indian institution where people came from the world over to gather knowledge and wisdom. He said he was sure the school, established by him in 2017, would do well.
The new school is supported by the APJ Education Society (AES) in honour of Seth Stya Paul, eminent educationist and philanthropist.
Stya Satsang Vidyalaya
The school now named the Stya Satsang Vidyalaya (SSV) has nine classrooms, a staff room, a library and activity room, a composite science laboratory and a wet kitchen with a well laid out area for cooking two nutritious meals that are provided to the children every day. The terrace is strong enough to allow expansion and building an equal number of rooms on the first floor.
The school provides free and quality education along with textbooks, notebooks, stationary items, school bags, winter and summer uniforms. Free and regular medical camps ensure that the children are healthy. Two batches of 20 students have graduated from the school after Grade 8, of which 18 have enrolled for higher studies.
Transforming lives in the rural hinterland
During the inauguration, the children presented heart-warming cultural programmes mapping the journey of the school from a batch of 14 small malnourished students who were washed and bathed and taught basic hygiene by the earliest volunteers in 2017, to the bright eyed, alert and lively batch of 162 students that now populate its premises.
Their parents are either daily wage labourers or farmhands in the surrounding fields. Of the 162 students, 84 are girls and 78 are boys, many of them rescued from child labour in their early years. Gender sensitivity has increased the enrolment of girls who are provided free sanitary pads as well. One of their skits showed the children acting as parents responding to others acting as local education officers enumerating the special qualities of the school. Of these, the most striking was the fact that the school had 12 teachers and 5 non-teaching staff, accounting for a student teacher ratio of 1:13, one of the best in Uttar Pradesh.
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To know more about Stya Satsang Vidyalaya Lathira, please write to connect@satsang-foundation.org.
