Prashanthi Balamandira Trust
Prashanthi Balamandira Trust is a public charitable Trust embedded firmly on the principle of ‘Love All Serve All’, rendering selfless service to the needy with a unique blend of spiritual and intellectual education. The Trust is actively engaged in the quintessential expanses of societal relevance such as educare, healthcare, and sociocare; that caters exclusively to the education, health and nutrition needs of children, completely free-of-cost. The Trust imparts values-based education free of cost to every child without any discrimination to create youth with brilliant intellect, compassionate hearts and competent hands.
The Prashanthi Balamandira Trust (PBMT) came into existence in the year 1981, and ever since, have been establishing and managing world-class educational infrastructure in rural India, with first priority to the needy rural children. The mission of providing values-based education catapulted in the last 10 years, where over 21 educational Campuses along with 6 other Campuses of its allied Trusts in 20 districts of Karnataka and one in Telangana and one in Tamil Nadu have been established in the rural hinterlands of South India. Rural and urban poor are prioritised in the admission process and currently about 5,000 students from the economically backward spectrum of the society are receiving the gift of integral values-based education in these temples of learning.
Educare is the prime function of the Trust and it continues to spread wings to disseminate the power of transformative education to all the districts in Karnataka in South India, and across other States in India, to prepare self-sacrificing individuals as leaders of tomorrow. Education experts define the most important skills for the twenty first century students of a global society, as the 4 Cs – critical thinking, communication, collaboration and creativity. But, the Trust considers the 5th C – character over and above the 4 Cs as the most important. Simply put, Character is the ability to do the right thing always. The education system is based on the philosophy that the integrated development of a child should have the right balance of academic, moral and spiritual education. The Trust through its Institutions has a child-centric, balanced and insightful approach, where learning is truly a joy.
PBMT in association with its allied Healthcare Trust, Sri Sathya Sai Health and Education Trust, contributes to the functioning of Sri Sathya Sai Sanjeevani Hospitals dedicated to Child Heart Care. Paediatric Cardiac Surgery, Cath Interventions, Consultation, Screening, Research on Congenital Heart Diseases, and Training in Paediatric Cardiac Skills are some of the major functions of the Sanjeevani Hospitals, currently established in the three cities of Nava Raipur Atal Nagar (Chhattisgarh), Palwal (Haryana) and Kharghar (Navi Mumbai). Precisely, PBMT has contributed towards 700 paediatric cardiac surgeries till date, which can be equated to 3.18% contribution out of the total 22,000+ surgeries and cath interventions done by these hospitals.
On the wing of Sociocare, PBMT helps in the fulfilment of daily morning nutrition needs of children in collaboration with the Sri Sathya Sai Annapoorna Trust, which provides 1,000,000 children with nutritious breakfast every morning, and till date more than 250 million breakfast meals have been served. PBMT supports nearly 7,000 children every year for their nutrition needs, which when derived mathematically is about 10% of the total expenditure incurred by the Annapoorna Trust, as they march towards the noble cause of ensuring that ‘No child goes to school hungry ever’.
PBMT in partnership with Hewlett Packard (HP) has taken a step towards bridging the technology gap, by empowering children in rural India with access to computer technology through two ‘HP World on Wheels’ (WOW) mobile computer labs. This initiative also aims at providing youth with digital literacy, entrepreneurship training, online classes, etc.