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A Decision That Changed the Course of Her Life

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Rahul Soni

“Education is the third eye of a child”, believes Prof. AchyutaSamanta,  Founder, KIIT & KISS. With this belief, he started a free residential school, Kalinga Institute Social Sciences (KISS), Bhubaneswar, for 125 tribal children in 1992-93.His modest social experiment had a resounding success and KISS has now grown into the largest tribal institute in the world with 60000 (30000 students in Bhubaneswar, 20000 alumni and 10000 students at 10 different satellite centres). It produces thousands of success stories every year. Balika Baskey from East Singhbhum, Jharkhand is just one among them.

 

 

                                                

 

Balika Baskey is an alumna of KISS. She has done her graduation in Commerce from KISS and PG Diploma in Community Development from KIIT Deemed to be University. She is currently working as a Call Centre Executive at Tatwa Technologies, a leading IT company in Bhubaneswar.

 “My family consists of five members including my mother and three younger sisters. We are poor and my father was the only bread earner before he fell sick. The condition of our family worsened as our only source of income stopped. My mother was forced to do daily wage labour to make both ends meet and buy medicines for my sick father”, she recounts her past. At that time, she was pursuing +2. She felt sad and helpless to see her mother’s plight.

 

 

Her father passed away within a year due to lack of proper treatment, leaving behind her mother to look after the four girls. “At that time, I had just completed my +2 and wanted to study further. But the road seemed closed for me. We were in very bad condition financially and helping my mother in menial work or getting married were only options left before me to reduce the burden on her,” she recalled.

But destiny had other plans. A Good Samaritan in the village informed the hapless family about KISS. To Balika, it sounded like a godsend opportunity to continue her education. But her mother was sceptical, because it involved going to another state. “My mother agreed after I insisted a lot. I applied and soon got a call for admission. The decision changed the course of my life,” she says.

“Though it is located far from my native place, I felt at home in KISS. I could celebrate festivals of my community felt proud of my culture. I was good in tribal dance, and it provided me the chance to perform before an international audience. I also got to know about the cultures and traditions of many other tribal communities. But for KISS, I would have been working as a daily wage labourer or got married”, she says about her transformative experience in KISS.

Balika is financially independent now and also has surplus to send home. She looks up to Dr.Samanta as a “godfather, who takes care of KISS students as his own children. I am ever grateful to him for making me a self-sufficient, confident and strong woman and, above all, a good human being”. Besides progressing in her profession, she dreams to be a change agent for her community and tell them about the importance of education, especially for girls.


Written bySoumya Arunav Sahoo            Edited by: Rajesh Verma

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Rahul Soni
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