IIT-JEE 2010 (Class XI) Final Forty Scholars selected for two years class room training at a JNV in your region

Dakshana is a sanskrit word meaning to give or receive a gift. The Dakshana Foundation is a young philanthropic foundation focused on alleviating poverty. Education is the most powerful and enduring weapon to win the battle against poverty. Thus Dakshana is focused on providing world-class educational opportunities to economically and socially disadvantaged gifted children worldwide. Our initial focus is on providing 1-2 years of world-class IIT-JEE (Joint Entrance Exam) coaching to gifted, but impoverished students in rural India.

These adolescents receive a gift from Dakshana in their time of need. There is an expectation that, as adults, they would be giving gifts to adolescents in situations similar to their own in earlier years – either through Dakshana or via other organizations. They can also choose to giveback nothing. The cornerstone of Dakshana’s model is that the beneficiary of aid today is the donor of tomorrow. Dakshana’s model is self-sustaining and scalable.

The Dakshana Foundation is a tax-exempt private charitable foundation approved by the IRS in the United States under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. The Dakshana India Educational Trust is an approved charity by various government entities in India.

Dakshana’s intial focus is on the 750 Million people living in India’s 640,000 villages. Large swaths of India’s massive rural population live in extreme poverty and are mostly left out of the economic growth boom underway in the country. Rural India comprises 70% of the country’s population. At institutions like the IIT’s, less than 5% of the students come from impoverished rural backgrounds. At Dakshana, we see education as having one of the highest ROIs of any charitable endeavor – especially when directed towards gifted rural impoverished children.

Dakshana's intial focus to fund scholarships for gifted students from impoverished poor rural families to get prepped to take the IIT JEE from the best training institutes in India. The foundation does this through two approaches:

1. Dakshana has a strong partnership established with the Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas (JNV - http://navodaya.gov.in/) whereby we provide 2 years of IIT JEE prep for about 300-400 Dakshana Scholars annually of the best and brightest students at 7 JNV campuses throughout India. These 300 students have been tested and picked from a pool of over 40,000 JNV 11th graders. And those 40,000 themselves were picked on the basis of merit from a pool of a million children that apply to the JNVs for admission every year. The program costs Dakshana approximately $4000 per Dakshana Scholar over 2 years.
   
   
2. The foundation moves accepted Dakshana Scholars to Kota, Rajasthan after 12th grade (1 year of prep). As of this writing (April, 2008), Dakshana has 5 such Dakshana Scholars in Kota and is about to add 80 more. This program costs Dakshana approximately $3000 per scholar per year.

Click here to see the Dakshana Model for impoverished IIT scholars

Taking inspiration from Grameen Bank and Nobel laureate Mohammed Yunus, Dakshana is eventually intended to be a “non-loss entity.” Non-profit entities typically have an endless cycle of fund raising to sustain operations. At Dakshana, we intend that, like Grameen Bank, the beneficiary of aid today is the donor of tomorrow. Dakshana Scholars have a voluntary moral (but not a legal or contractual) obligation to donate 10% of their monthly lifetime earnings back to the Dakshana Network to fund future Dakshana Scholarships. They need not accomplish through Dakshana. They could do it in any way they see fit . After a decade or two, we fully expect Dakshana to be sustained and grow from this voluntary giveback.

While the initial focus of Dakshana is very narrow, we strongly believe in first achieving some measure of success in this narrow domain before gradually broadening our focus. Some areas we could expand to in the future include:

• Getting involved with gifted kids earlier in their lives. Currently we start with 11th graders. We could look at programs in 9th grade and 10th grade to expand the number of IIT JEE scholars.
• We could also broaden out to other disciplines like Medicine, the Arts etc.
• Today our primary focus is on IITs and secondarily on the National Institutes of Technology. We could have a separate program focused on AIEEE.
• We could look at geographies outside India at other underdeveloped countries.

Finally, we do hope other look at our model and apply it in different contexts, geographies, disciplines etc. That was one of the drivers for the creation of this website - to encourage other to copy, lift and scale. Please register on the website and use our message board to share your thoughts and perspectives with the Dakshana community.

You may find it instructive to read Dakshana’s 2007 Annual Report. Thank you for visiting.

Warm regards,

Mohnish Pabrai
Founder & Catalyst