Sri Rakum School for the Blind

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Sri Rakum School for the Blind offers free education to blind students from Kindergarten to post-graduation. The training imparted includes reading and writing through Braille and mobility training for the totally blind children. The curriculum includes many extra curricular activities like karate, yoga, fine arts and crafts. The school has a computer training center equipped with special screen reading software to assist and enable the Visually Impaired to work with computers.

The school also offers free accommodation for its students. The school extends its services to normal but destitute children also. The school has an integrated approach wherein the both sighted and blind children live and study in the same environment, which gives a boost and emotional moral support to the blind children that they are not left out. Also by admitting able bodied (but underprivileged) students, the school creates a unique atmosphere for the disabled students in which they can mingle, interact and help each other. This helps develop their social skills and confidence.

The school was started by Acharya (i.e. Principal) Sri Rakum in June, 1998. It was born out of realization that children who were born blind were shunned and denied all opportunities to grow. These children hailed from villages and tribal belts and came from very poor families. The school is a unique non-governmental organization running entirely on the community donations.

The school has three branches: Indiranagar School is home to about 150 underprivileged boys and girls both sighted and visually impaired, from five years to twenty-six years of age. The school provides them free food, clothing, shelter and education. The school is located at No.421, Sri Krishna Temple Road, Indiranagar 1st Stage, Bangalore–560 038, India. The school could be contacted at (080) 25215253 / 25215705 / 25254721 or www.rakum.org.

Devanahalli School was started in the year June 1st, 2003. The Devanahalli area is surrounded by quarries employing stone cutters. The school offers free education, lunch and tea-snacks to the children of these stone cutters who would otherwise never go to school. These children make to school from surrounding 21 villages. To this date, the school supports about 300 children and about 20 inmates.

Arkavathy School is a school for the Nursery, LKG and UKG kids from the age group of 2.5years to 5 years. The school is presently running under a total campus area of 7200sft, with two small sheds. Each shed is 500 sft in area and they are used as classrooms. Plans are there to slowly expand to construct more sheds and a proper building for the school.