Sutradhar, a Bangalore-based educational resource centre, was set up as a registered charitable trust in 1995. It stemmed from two contradictory faces to the Indian overview – the dearth of innovative educational material on the one hand; the wealth of such material that was scattered across the country, on the other.

Its focus is on distilling the best of such innovations and showcasing them under one roof. It consciously promotes media that is Indian in content and form to make learning more meaningful.

Conceptually, Sutradhar arose from the experiences of its founder-director Mandira Kumar. During her four years as the all-India educational coordinator at CRY (Child Relief and You) from 1990, she travelled across the country, often to physically isolated places, meeting over 100 educators and organizations. She shared their ideas while gathering materials and designing learning resources. She began to appreciate the effort that went into design and fabrication.

“I was like a honey-bee. I was carrying information and ideas about one person’s experience to the others in different geographical contexts. It seemed a shame that they didn’t know about the work that other individuals or organizations were doing or drawing on their experiences,” Mandira recalls.

The innovations that triggered Sutradhar were both diverse and individualistic. Such as the process folio evolved by Sister Cyril at the Loreto School in Sealdah, Kolkata, while teaching street children, who often attended irregularly. Or the ‘school in a box’ that grew out of the Rishi Valley rural schools project.

The core idea of Sutradhar was to make educational innovations more visible, to document and disseminate them, perhaps even to multiply their impact through its living laboratory.

While sourcing materials and finding available resources, Sutradhar joined hands wit h non-profit educational groups like the Centre for Learning Resources, Mobile Creches and Eklavya, traditional craftspeople working in wood, coir, cloth, bamboo and metal, a range of folk artists and even publishers of children’s books like Chennai-based Tulika and Tara. 

Thinking holistically, Sutradhar has attempted to address the lacunae wit hin the education overview. This it has done in a number of ways including putting together the status report on the young child in Karnataka, which links factors like health, sex selective abortions, maternity entitlements, and preschool education. It has also recently published a book on the work of 23 NGOs engaged in improving pan-Indian government schools; conducted an Open Forum series of interfaces as a space for collaborative learning; studied the anganwadis in Bangalore in 2002; held a UNESCO-aided workshop on toys for differently-abled children; compiled Fingertips, a child resource directory for Bangalore; and conducted workshops like one on play and learning by lauded preschool educational consultant, Indira Swaminathan, among other initiatives.  

Sutradhar’s Early Learning Kit for 3 to 6-year-olds, field tested at a thousand anganwadis across Karnataka in 1999, has been widely disseminated at preschools throughout India. It includes a 32-piece set for shape, colour and texture recognition, a seriation tower, a threading board, a construction set, beads to string together, a lacquered kitchen set in wood, concept cards and an inset tray wit h animals. Evolved from the best of available Indian crafts and materials in primary colours, it offers plenty for the fledgling mind to toy wit h while learning. A teacher’s guide accompanies it.