Allahabad: As cars zoom past the iconic Company Garden, the traffic chaos and the honking horns might have distracted anyone else but they fail to perturb the enamoured group of children sitting on the pavement, listening intently to the youth in front of them.The man for his part seems to be busy teaching the children with just four white boards and a marker for assistance. The absence of a classroom, uniforms instead of the tattered clothes on the children’s bodies notwithstanding, there was nothing amiss about the knowledge exchanged.That’s ‘Padhshala’—study centre named after Hindi word for school ‘pathshala’—for you. Run by a handful of youth, the organisation conducts daily classes to teach underprivileged children of the city on the pavement.The initiative is the brainchild of city-based IAS aspirant Manish Singh.“We conduct classes for underprivileged children at two locations in Allahabad. We not teach them or help them with books but also organising routine medical check ups and provide them with medicines,” said Singh. The humble efforts of its patrons, which include interns, doctors, students and even IAS aspirants, are its backbone. Presently, Padhshala conducts two-hour classes every evening and caters of a batch of 50 students at each of these centres. “During evening, I used to go for a swim, but when I saw a group of Allahabad University students teaching these young children living in slums, I joined them,” Akshay Anand Mishra, a doctor by profession and a volunteer at ‘Padhshala’. Two other volunteers, Harish Gupta and Vikrant Yadav, are pursuing BA from AU. “These children are smart and it is only the matter of seeing the world through their eyes,” they said. Most of the students associated with ‘Padhshala’ have the same story to tell. Their parents are too busy earning a living and cannot afford to send them to schools. “The rate of dropping out of schools is high among children living in slums and they lack a motivation to study. Things are different now as we are also prepping them for entrance tests of some local schools, where they could be granted admission via the special quota under Right to Education Act (RTE),” said Mishra.

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