Samir Shukla
After two years of hosting annual organizational meets virtually, “Ekal Vidyalaya Foundation (EVF)”, last month hosted an in-person International Conference in Chicago for its USA, Canada and India components to review and recalibrate the roadmap for the future. The main agenda of the conference was to put Ekal (as it is popularly known) on the FastTrack after some setbacks in 2020-21 due to Covid pandemic. Thus, Ekal is launching a new technology driven era by appointing Dr. Subra Dravida, V.P. of Qualcomm’s technology division as the new President of Ekal-USA. After the previous President, Suresh Iyer, a successful entrepreneur in the field of Information Technology had brought EVF to the threshold of digitized world.
Dravida has been associated with Ekal for some time now. He had been the President of New England Chapter of Ekal for 4 years, then a member of ‘Board of Directors’ and recently, an Executive V.P., working closely with Suresh Iyer and Ekal-USA Chairman, Arun Gupta.
Ekal is the largest literacy movement globally undertaken by NRIs and Indians that also provide healthcare training, economic empowerment, and integrated village development to the rural folks. Currently, it is running 78,000 schools that is grooming 2.1 million each year across rural-tribal parts of India. When asked about what initially attracted him to Ekal, Dravida said, “I had been attending Ekal fund raisers for some time and it is Ekal’s concept of running a whole school for mere $365 a year is what pulled me in.”
For more details, visit ekal.org/us.
