Why the Committee Runs a Separate Fund for Girls' Education

The BRKM Reunion committee has long carried a quiet conviction that education is the most reliable lever a community can pull, and a closer look at recent alumni meetings shows why a dedicated stream of money now exists for girls. From the noticeboards of Baranagore to the lounge rooms of former students in Sydney and Melbourne, the conversation keeps returning to the same question: how do we make sure that a family with three daughters and a tight household budget does not have to choose which child finishes senior secondary school? A separate fund answers that question with a single, visible commitment rather than a footnote in a general scholarship budget.

It also reflects a generational shift in how alumni view their giving. Older batches remember the days when the school had few female students past class eight, while the batches that finished in the nineties and two-thousands graduated alongside far more women who went on to college and into the workforce. Those alumni, many of whom now work as nurses, teachers, software engineers, and small business owners in places like Brisbane, Adelaide, and Perth, want their contributions to reach a cohort they recognise as their own. Pooling girls' education money into a general pot was practical, but it was also easy to overlook, and the committee decided that visibility matters as much as the rupees themselves.

A fund built around a specific gap

The fund was not created because boys and girls at the ashrama high school sit in different classrooms. They share the same playground, the same Sanskrit teacher, the same morning assembly. The gap the committee is responding to is what happens after the school gates close. Across West Bengal and the surrounding districts, household surveys done by local NGOs repeatedly show that when money is tight, girls are the first to be pulled out of school to help with younger siblings, to take a domestic job in a relative's home, or to marry early. A general scholarship can be used for either gender and often gets allocated to whoever applies first or whoever has the loudest advocate in the family.

A girls-only fund changes that dynamic. It can be ring-fenced for items that are particularly likely to keep a girl in school: sanitary supplies, transport to an exam centre, the cost of a coaching class for a science stream, or fees for a vocational course after class ten. It can also support families who keep their daughters enrolled through years eleven and twelve, which is the period when dropout rates climb the sharpest. The committee treats the fund less as charity and more as a contingency plan, a way of standing between a girl and the set of pressures that often arrives in the final years of school.

The approach has parallels far from the ashrama grounds. In Australia, federal programmes and university-level scholarships recognise that targeted funding is usually more effective than broad subsidies, because the barriers facing different groups are not identical. The University of Sydney, the University of Melbourne, and regional universities in Queensland and Western Australia run scholarships that are specifically earmarked for women returning to STEM fields after a career break. The principle travels well: when a fund has a name, it has a purpose, and purpose is what makes a donor's dollar stick.

Why a separate ledger matters to the committee

Running a dedicated fund is also an exercise in accounting clarity. The committee produces an annual statement for the alumni body, and a single line that says "girls' education fund: ₹4.2 lakh disbursed across 38 students" is far easier to defend, audit, and grow than a paragraph buried in a general welfare budget. Alumni in their fifties and sixties, many of whom now sit in finance roles across Sydney's CBD or manage portfolios along Melbourne's Collins Street, have pushed for this kind of granularity because it allows them to report the impact of their giving inside their own workplaces and family foundations.

There is a storytelling element too. A fund with a specific name is easier to mention at reunions, in WhatsApp groups, and during the winter gatherings in Kolkata when former students travel home for the ashrama's annual function. A donor can say, with a straight face, that their contribution paid for a girl in Duttapukur to sit her higher secondary exams, and they can hand over a small receipt with a name on it. That kind of transparency is what keeps older alumni renewing their annual pledges, and what encourages younger batches, now scattered between Hyderabad, Dubai, and the eastern suburbs of Melbourne, to start giving before they turn forty.

The committee has also noticed that a named fund behaves a bit like a memorable hook in a song: it is the part that stays in the listener's head after the music has stopped. The craft of writing a clear vocal hook is essentially about making one phrase cut through everything else around it, and a charity line in an alumni newsletter works the same way. A line that reads "girls' education fund, ₹4.2 lakh disbursed" gets noticed; a line that reads "miscellaneous welfare support" gets skimmed past. The committee has also learned that a separate fund attracts matching contributions. Several Indian corporate social responsibility programmes prefer to fund named initiatives, and a girls' education fund fits neatly into the gender-equality outcomes that many CSR teams are required to report. Two local NGOs in the North 24 Parganas district have already approached the committee about co-funding specific students, something that would have been much harder to negotiate if the money had been folded into an undifferentiated welfare pool.

Working in step with the study center

The fund does not operate in isolation. It sits alongside the ashrama's study center, which the committee set up several years ago to help students who arrive from neighbouring villages underprepared in mathematics, English, and basic science. The two streams are designed to complement each other: the study center handles the academic gap that many students carry into class nine, while the girls' education fund removes the financial reasons a family might pull a student out before that gap can be closed. Alumni who want to see the academic side of the work can read more about overcoming academic gaps, and the two pages together paint a fuller picture of what the committee does between the school gates and the exam hall.

Coordinating the two initiatives is not always straightforward. The study center runs after school, which means a girl who has domestic duties at home may not be able to attend evening tutoring even if her fees are paid. The committee has responded by funding a small transport allowance for the most committed students, and by arranging Saturday morning revision sessions that fit more comfortably around household routines. None of this is glamorous, and none of it makes for a glossy annual report, but the committee has decided that small, unglamorous supports are exactly the kind of thing a separate fund should be paying for.

A few alumni in Australia have asked whether the study center and the fund should eventually be merged into a single programme. The committee's view is that they should remain separate on paper but joined at the hip in practice. Merging them would dilute the visibility of both, and it would make it harder to attract donors who want to support a specific cause, such as menstrual health supplies or coaching for competitive exams, rather than education in the abstract.

How the fund reaches the girls who need it

Identifying recipients is delicate work. The committee works through the school's existing teachers, who know which families are on the edge, and it cross-checks names with a local women's self-help group that has been active in the block for more than a decade. Applications are not advertised openly, because the committee is wary of creating a sense of public selection in a small school. Instead, families are approached quietly, often through a senior teacher who has known them for years, and the offer is framed as help from older brothers and sisters who once sat in the same classrooms.

Once a girl is on the fund, the support is reviewed every six months. Attendance, marks, and a short conversation with the student herself are the main checkpoints, and the committee has learned that the conversation matters as much as the marks. Several recipients have used the check-in to raise issues that no one in their family was willing to bring up: a father who had lost his job, a brother who was unwell, a household that had been forced to move. Those conversations have sometimes led to additional, one-off support from the welfare budget, which is a small but real argument for keeping a flexible reserve alongside the dedicated fund.

The committee is also exploring whether the same model can be extended to digital skills. Many of the girls who finish class twelve under the fund go on to short courses in basic computing, and a few alumni in Sydney's tech corridor and Melbourne's Cremorne start-up scene have offered to mentor students remotely. The committee is in no rush, because it has learned that scaling too fast is the easiest way to lose the close, personal feel that makes the fund work in the first place.

What alumni across the diaspora can do

For alumni in Australia, the most useful first step is simply to know that the fund exists and to mention it at the next batch gathering in Parramatta, in a tea stall in Footscray, or over a video call with friends in Calcutta. Word of mouth remains the committee's single biggest source of new donors, and a brief mention in a class WhatsApp group often produces more pledges than a polished email campaign. Alumni who are running small businesses, whether it is a clinic in Brisbane or a consultancy in Adelaide, can also set up a quarterly standing order, which gives the committee a predictable base to plan around.

Alumni who have particular skills can offer them directly. A retired schoolteacher in Hobart might help design a reading list for the study center; an accountant in Perth might review the fund's annual statement; a software engineer in Canberra might build a simple donor dashboard. The committee does not need every alumnus to write a cheque, and it is often grateful for time spent in the same way that it is grateful for money. Donations in kind, such as a bulk shipment of textbooks from a publisher in Sydney, can also be routed through the fund if the committee is given enough notice.

Finally, alumni can help the fund survive changes in the school's leadership. A new headmaster, a new district education officer, or a shift in state government policy can all move the ground under the ashrama's feet, and a fund that has a long list of named donors scattered across the world is harder to redirect or quietly close. In a small way, every alumnus who renews their pledge is voting for the fund's continued existence, and the committee is quietly counting on that vote, year after year, to keep the ledger open and the girls in school.