Traversing Troy: Pathway

November 14^this Children’s Day in India. It marks the birthday of the country’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who reportedly loved children. Local schools conduct artistic contests, extol Nehru’s virtues through presentations and speeches, and distribute sweets and other prizes to commemorate the day.

I celebrated by visiting the children at Pathway, a local non-profit organization. Pathway was started in 1975 when a 22 year-old speech pathologist and audiologist, Dr. ADSN Prasad, took in two disabled children who had no one else to care for them. Over time, this effort grew into a school and residential facility for mentally disabled children. Today, Pathway consists of three separate facilities and has served 22,000 children and adults. The original school in Chennai caters to 300 mentally disabled youth, 100 of which live on the premises. (For more information on Pathway please see here and here.) Students are provided with diagnostic, medical, and dental services and a full-fledged treatment plan. The organization’s mission statement reads: “Our goal is to offer comprehensive care and assistance to as many children as our facilities can accommodate without regard to their religion, caste, creed, or sex. If we can in turn help those individuals develop the skills and self esteem to become productive citizens of our country, our mission is accomplished.”

Pathway also operates a vocational training institute and factory in Koothavakkam which employs 50 mentally disabled adults, including many former students, in printing, jewelry-making, baking, and woodworking. Along with the school in Chennai, I was able to visit a third site operated by the organization in Agili, about 90 minutes from the city. The beautiful 60 acre farm hosts a school and residential facility for orphaned and destitute children. Separate dorms house 74 boys and 113 girls who attend kindergarten through tenth grade at the school. Two additional buildings, currently under construction, are designed to cater to mentally disabled youth. The completion of these facilities will bolster Dr. Prasad’s vision of integrating disabled and full-functioning youth to provide learning opportunities to both groups. A “hospital on wheels” operated by Pathway also provides medical care to a large number of poor villagers in the vicinity of the farm.

Funded by domestic and international donors, the Pathway facilities provide food, clothing, medical care and other necessities free of charge in addition to schooling. The organization also benefits from synergies as bakery goods and furniture made in Koothavakkam can be used in Chennai and Agili and food grown on the farm in Agili can be used in Chennai and Koothavakkam. Dr. Prasad hopes to soon install solar panels to overcome the challenges of frequent power cuts and garner the benefits of a sustainable energy source (if anyone has connections to solar energy companies looking for corporate social responsibility initiatives or donors willing to support such a project, please let me know; hundreds of current students and many future generations of children would be extremely grateful).

In a country where the government is, at best, inefficient and overwhelmed, and too often corrupt as well, non-profit organizations and businesses succeed in spite of the government, not because of it. It is not the government but civil society and world-class firms that are driving the incredible transformation of India as it emerges onto the world economic stage. Pathway is heir to a long lineage of progressive social organizations, such as fraternal societies, Rotary Clubs International, and the Salvation Army, which generations ago created a more compassionate, prosperous society in the U.S. It is Dr. Prasad and the thousands of individuals like him in countries across the world that will bring about a better tomorrow and propel hope into the future.