BHUBANESWAR, OCT 12: The initiatives taken up by National Aluminium Company Limited (NALCO) towards bringing 655 tribal children of Koraput district to the mainstream education, has been lauded at different forums. Recently, the company has bagged OTV CSR Award 2015 for this initiative, under primary education category.
Notably, since the beginning of its operations, NALCO has given due importance to provide quality education to the children residing in the periphery of its plants. In this regard, the company has set up four schools – two Odia-medium (Saraswati Vidya Mandir) and two English-medium (Delhi Public School) – at Damanjodi and Angul. Besides children of NALCO employees, other children also avail the benefit of quality education in these schools at subsidized rates.
Moving a step further, NALCO Foundation, the CSR arm of the company, operated remedial schools in five tribal villages around its Mines & Refinery Complex. The schools prepared 224 drop-out children for re-inducting into formal education system. Subsequently, as one of its major projects, NALCO Foundation collaborated with reputed residential institutions for providing quality education to the children of tribal-dominated and Maoist-infested periphery villages of Damanjodi sector in Koraput.
The company has so far sponsored residential education of 655 children from 18 periphery villages, including 224 children from the remedial schools. The Foundation’s funding covers all the costs related to study, lodging and boarding of the students across three residential schools in Bhubaneswar (Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences) and Koraput (Koraput Development Foundation Model School and Bikash Vidyalaya). The funding for residential education for the enrolled students has been planned till they complete schooling.
