NGO Pratham gets Indira Gandhi Prize

NGO Pratham gets Indira Gandhi Prize

Subject : Awards and Recognitions

Context : Former Vice-President Hamid Ansari presented the Indira Gandhi Prize for Peace, Disarmament and Development of 2021 to Pratham, an NGO functioning in the field of education.

Concept : 

• The award is in recognition of Pratham’s work in ensuring quality education for children of the country, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Pratham also used digital technology to deliver education so that the children could learn during the school closure amid the pandemic.

About Indira Gandhi Prize 

• The Indira Gandhi Prize for Peace, Disarmament and Development was instituted in the memory of the former prime minister by a trust (Indira Gandhi Memorial Trust) in her name in 1986.
• It consists of a monetary award of Rs 25 lakh along with a citation.
• The award is given to individuals or organisations who work towards ensuring international peace and development, ensuring that scientific discoveries are used to further the scope of freedom and better humanity, and creating a new international economic order.

NGO Pratham

• Set up in 1995, Pratham began its work in slum areas by setting up community-based pre-schools and by offering remedial education to students who lagged behind in their classes.
• Its Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), based on surveying 6,00,000 rural Indian children, is now used as a model to assess education outcomes and learning deficiencies in 14 countries over three continents.
• To respond to the concerns raised by ASER, in 2007 Pratham launched its flagship programme, Read India, which aims to improve children’s learning by strengthening basic reading and arithmetic.