Project Udaan — Koru Foundation
Koru Foundation · Education Initiative

Project
Udaan

Empowering Through Education

Project Udaan stands as a beacon of academic hope and grassroots empowerment for children in marginalized communities facing acute educational challenges. Centered on a unique youth teaching fellowship model, Udaan recruits, trains, and deploys local community youth as dedicated fellows to conduct impactful remedial classes in foundational Mathematics and English. By leveraging NCERT-aligned pedagogical models and baseline assessment tools, Udaan bridges learning gaps, fosters critical thinking, and instills a lifelong passion for learning. At its core, the project is a shared learning journey—nurturing tribal and underprivileged children toward academic excellence while simultaneously building a new generation of socially conscious youth leaders within the community.

Mission
To enable the youth from vulnerable and marginalised sections of the community to be Changemakers who can bridge educational inequity.
2,400+
Students benefited
through remedial classes
Project Udaan students
🖼Image 1 — Top wide
Classroom activity
🖼Image 2
Learning centre
🖼Image 3
Std 5–8
Target student
age group
The Challenge

Education for All — Still a Promise Unfulfilled

Despite decades of policy and investment, educational inequity remains a defining challenge of our time. Students from government schools — particularly from marginalised and tribal communities — fall through the cracks of a system that was never fully designed for them.

Through Project Udaan, we provide remedial classes to students of government schools from Standard 5th to 8th. Using individual assessments, we identify students who cannot yet read or write the alphabet, form words and sentences, or do basic comprehension. Similarly, we identify students who cannot perform subtraction, multiplication, or division even at 14–15 years of age — and we work with them, patiently and personally, to close that gap.

Our approach is rooted in the belief that every child has the capacity to learn. What they need is not pity — they need a system that meets them where they are.

📖
Literacy Focus
Identifying students who cannot read alphabets, words, or sentences — and building foundational reading ability from the ground up.
➕
Numeracy Focus
Working with students who cannot perform basic operations — subtraction, multiplication, division — at ages when they should already know these skills.
🌱
Changemaker Development
Recruiting and training local youth — recent school graduates, community college students, and career explorers — as teaching fellows, giving them a financially stable fellowship alongside the students they teach.
👩‍👧
Girl Child Focus
Reducing dropout rates among girls, creating gender-equal classrooms, and empowering girls from marginalised communities to lead.
Vision & Objectives

What Project Udaan Stands For

Addressing inequity in education requires a clear, multi-dimensional vision. These are the seven objectives that guide every decision we make.

01
To create gender-equal classrooms where every student — regardless of gender — has an equal right to learn, participate, and lead.
02
Reducing the number of girl dropouts from schools every year by addressing the social, economic, and infrastructural barriers they face.
03
Designing experiential, learning-based curriculum with a focus on Social Emotional Learning (SEL) — education that reaches the whole child.
04
Focus on girl child education as a strategic priority — because when you educate a girl, you educate a generation.
05
Training new fellows to be Changemakers — ensuring the vision of equitable education outlasts any single programme or person.
06
Bridge the learning gap between children in basic literacy and numeracy — ensuring no child is left behind because the system moved too fast.
07
Empowering girls from marginalised communities to be Changemakers — not just beneficiaries of education, but its future champions.
✦
"Every child has the capacity to learn. What they need is a system that meets them where they are."
The Lahunipada Model

The Bridge Programme

The Lahunipada Bridge Programme is an initiative to support the education of children from tribal groups in Sundergarh district, Odisha. Before the pandemic, an assessment by Pranay Manjari revealed that children in several tribal villages had not met baseline learning outcomes in basic literacy and numeracy.

That assessment was the inception of the Lahunipada Bridge Programme — a network of community learning centres where remedial teaching is conducted by educated locals. The programme began with four community teachers appointed across five different villages: Badabil, Mahulpada, Uskela, and Bandhberna.

When the pandemic struck, it made the situation far worse — especially for children who had no access to the internet. Rather than becoming irrelevant, the programme became more necessary than ever. In November 2021, Shreejita Das joined as teacher and learning centre-in-charge, adding the Khuntgaon Learning Centre to the network. The Kahani Project joined as a partner, and its continuous support has helped the programme grow ever since.

Programme Timeline
2020
Assessment by Pranay Manjari reveals critical learning gaps in tribal villages of Sundergarh district. Bridge Programme is conceived.
Pre-
2020
Four community teachers appointed across Badabil, Mahulpada, Uskela, and Bandhberna — the first learning centres take root.
2020–
21
Pandemic hits. Children without internet access face steep regression. The Bridge Programme becomes more critical than ever.
Nov
2021
Shreejita Das joins as teacher-in-charge. Khuntgaon Learning Centre added. Kahani Project becomes a key partner.
Villages with Learning Centres
Badabil Mahulpada Uskela Bandhberna Khuntgaon
Community visit
Learning centre
Students
Community Connect

Trust is the Foundation

Six months ago, Shreejita reached a place of a different culture and language — with a certain fear of not being accepted easily. But in the initial months, she and the learning space started building a relationship of trust with the children. Eventually, she felt that their lifestyle and daily lives needed to be explored to truly understand the children's actions and motivations.

It was also important to understand how villagers themselves perceive education. Community visits taught her that people trust a space when they find true compassion and respect for their lives. When compassion is present, language is no longer a barrier to communication.

Drives for joining the learning centre were also a part of these community visits — and students of the centre led those drives proudly.

5
Total community visits conducted
2
Visits to Khuntgaon Village
2+1
Nuadihi & Sadhunahal Village visits
Measurable Progress

Some Learning Outcomes

Real progress with real students — documented before and after to show the measurable impact of consistent, compassionate remedial education.

Bidya
Class 8th
Writes simple words — hen, fan, rat etc.
Before (March)
Initially she could not read or write simple words. She could recognise familiar words but could not pronounce or write unknown simple words.
After (May)
After working throughout the month, she can now pronounce and write unfamiliar three-letter simple words including those with vowels.
Milestone Achieved
Priyanka
10th Pass
Uses meaningful short sentences · Nouns, pronouns & verbs
Before (December)
She could not write a meaningful, grammatically correct simple sentence in English.
After (May)
Now she makes structured sentences using nouns, pronouns, and verbs — and can write a picture story. Imagination is now visible in her writing. Grammatical accuracy is improving steadily.
Major Improvement Noted
Snehashree
Class 9th
Uses meaningful sentences · Nouns, pronouns & verbs in writing
Before (March)
She could not write grammatically correct and meaningful sentences. Pronoun usage in sentences was absent.
After (May)
She now uses pronouns correctly in sentences and writes picture stories using nouns, pronouns, and verbs. A significant improvement in writing quality — imagination is now expressed on the page.
Milestone Achieved
Rajat
Class 7th
Analyses & applies appropriate number operations in real-life contexts
Before (December)
He could not apply multiplication in context — unable to use multiplication to solve real-life problems like calculating bills or grocery expenses.
After (May)
Now he can apply multiplication to daily life situations, represent problems pictorially, and calculate grocery and picnic expenses independently. He applies maths outside the classroom.
Real-World Application Achieved
Three-Year Journey

From Sundergarh to Jamshedpur

Udaan began as five village learning centres in tribal Odisha. Three years on, it has grown into a dual-geography programme — still rooted in Lahunipada, now also running inside Jamshedpur government and low-income private schools.

Year 1
2022 – 23
136Beneficiary children
5Learning centres (Odisha)
5Community teachers
—Early baseline diagnostics only
Year 2
2023 – 24
140Beneficiary children (Sundargarh + Jamshedpur)
4+1Odisha centres + 1 Jamshedpur pilot centre
ASERDiagnostic tool baseline implemented
2Odisha fellows + Jamshedpur team
60Students at Rajasthan Vidya Mandir pilot
Year 3
2024 – 25
300Beneficiary children (Sundargarh + Jamshedpur)
3+2Odisha centres + 2 Jamshedpur school chapters
ASER +
NCERTAligned learning-level assessment
5+Odisha fellows + Jamshedpur fellows
✓Written curriculum finalised
By Year 3, Udaan had expanded beyond the Lahunipada villages into Jamshedpur itself — running school-based chapters at Rajasthan Vidya Mandir and Sidhu Kanhu School, a low-income private school. Total beneficiaries grew from 136 children in Year 1 to over 300 by Year 3, more than doubling the programme's reach in three years.
Project Udaan — By the Numbers

Every number represents a child who now reads, writes, or calculates with confidence they did not have before.

2,400+
Students benefited from remedial education
5
Village learning centres operational
120+
Sessions conducted across schools