The most memorable part of our recent trip to Yemmiganur, Andhra Pradesh, was a classroom.
As part of our visit to our client the Machani Group, we were taken to the Machani Somappa School, a project run by the IndiVillage Foundation for the past decade. The school provides education to children from some of the lowest-income families in the area, families for whom books, uniforms, and lunch costs are often out of reach, and where children are sometimes pulled into work instead of school.
The numbers speak for themselves. 195 children are currently enrolled, 57% of them girls, and the school has maintained a 0% dropout rate over the last three years. In a region where financial pressure regularly pulls children out of the classroom and into the workforce, that consistency is not a small achievement.
The commitment doesn’t stop at the high school level. The family also runs the Machani Santhamma Ramanna English Medium Primary School, a charity school built for the youngest learners, the children who wouldn’t otherwise have had access to schooling at all. The philosophy there is straightforward: every child is treated as capable of becoming one of the developers of India’s future, and the school exists to give kids the earliest possible foothold toward that, well before they’d reach the doors of the high school we visited.
Standing in that school, watching the kids in class, made the phrase “corporate social responsibility” feel a lot less abstract than it usually does in a slide deck. This wasn’t a one-off donation or a photo opportunity. It was a decade-long commitment, spanning both institutions, run with the same discipline the Machani Group applies to its business operations.
A genuine thank you to Supreetha for organizing the visit and taking us to her hometown. Seeing the school in person, meeting the kids and the team running it, made this one of the more grounding client visits we’ve had.