11 Tribal Kids from Tamil Nadu to go for Higher Education

In the tribal regions of the country, education of children becomes a big deal for their families. However, fighting from all the odds 11 tribal children from the Sukkavali cluster in the Ayyalur forest range are going to be the first ones to attend higher education from their respective villages. Let’s know more about these 11 tribal kids from Tamil Nadu who are going to go for higher education for the first time!

Their higher education is going to be sponsored by the Ponnammal Educational Trust. Along with attending higher education, these tribal children have also been made brand ambassadors of slenders loris by the SEEDS Trust. Slender loris is a nocturnal Asian pirate and belongs to a genus of loris. They face threats from poachers and thrive in the forest range but are not yet extinct. 

Ponnammal Educational Trust has decided to grant INR 1 lakh to every student through the SEEDS Trust. Slender loris conservation is known to interact with students regarding wildlife and nature conservation from time to time and they receive their funding from PAWS-Bosch through the SEEDS Trust. This year, slender loris appointed eleven tribal children as their brand ambassadors for the slender loris conservation project in that particular area.

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How were these 11 tribal kids from Tamil Nadu got selected for higher education program?

In order to find brand ambassadors for this project, the slender loris conservation selected a handful of students based on the following eligibility criteria- 

• Orphans who live with their relatives
• Children from families where there are more than five daughters.
• Children with disabled fathers and their mother is the sole earner for their family.
• Children from below poverty lines

P Muthusamy, the founder of SEEDS Trust has been involved in the conservation of slender loris for about 7 years now in the 40 villages of the ayyalur forest. He said that the tribal community didn’t realize the importance of bio-conservation and they were destroying them by overgrazing and other activities.

The students selected by the SEEDS Trust for higher education were- 

• A Pitchammal, Class XI student 
• C Sivakumar and G Gnanaprak, BSc students at RVS college 
• A Uthama Devi, a class X student
• C Naveen Kumar, a BSc student

All these children were selected as brand ambassadors so as to get the interest of students in wildlife and other educational stuff for that matter. This community has been suffering from child marriage resulting in children dropping out of schools due to the lack of awareness. 

However, after this activity, it was observed that these children became really fascinated by listening to all this new stuff and were intrigued to learn even more. Along with protecting the slender loris from poachers, these students also got a taste of higher education and said that they would very much like to go for higher education and will refrain from marrying at such a young age by teaching all about this to their parents as well.

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These 11 kids from Tamil Nadu are going to create history by going for higher education. Stay tuned to Leverage Edu for more such global educational updates.