PANTNAGAR, India - The classrooms of Nagla elementary school and 1,500 other schools in the Indian state of Uttarakhand are a laboratory for an educational approach unusual for Indian public schools.

Rather than being drilled and tested by rote on reproducing passages from textbooks, students write their own stories. And they pursue independent projects - as when fifth-grade students recently interviewed organizers of religious festivals and then made written and oral presentations.

That might seem commonplace in some other countries. But such activities are revolutionary in India, where public school students have long been drilled on memorizing facts and regurgitating them in stressful year-end exams that many children fail.

The five-year-old project to improve Indian education is being paid for by one of the country’s richest men, Azim H. Premji, the chairman of the information technology giant Wipro. Education experts at his Azim Premji Foundation are helping to train teachers in overhauling the way students are taught and tested.

Mr. Premji, 65, said there can be no higher priority if India is to fulfill its potential as an emerging economic giant. Because the Indian population is so youthful - nearly 500 million people, or 45 percent of the country’s total, are 19 or younger - improving the education system is one of the country’s most pressing challenges.

“The bright students rise to the top, which they do anywhere in any system,” said Mr. Premji. “The people who are underprivileged are not articulate, less self-confident, they slip further. They slip much further. You compound a problem of people who are handicapped socially.”

Outside India, many consider the country a wellspring of educated professionals, thanks to the many doctors and engineers who have moved to the West. But within India, there is widespread recognition that the country has not invested enough in education .

In the last five years, government spending on education has risen sharply - to $83 billion last year, up from less than half that level before. Schools now offer free lunches, which has helped raise enrollments to more than 90 percent of children.

But most Indian schools still perform poorly. Barely half of fifth-grade students can read simple texts in their language of study, according to a survey of 13,000 rural schools by Pratham, a nonprofit education group. And only about one-third of fifth graders can perform simple division problems . Most students drop out before they reach the 10th grade.

Those statistics stand in stark contrast to China, where a government focus on education has achieved a literacy rate of 94 percent of the population, compared with 64 percent in India.

Mr. Premji said he hoped his foundation would eventually make a difference for tens of millions of children by focusing on critical educational areas like exams, curriculum and teacher training.

He said he wanted to reach many more children than he could by opening private schools - the approach taken by many other wealthy Indians.

Mr. Premji, whose total wealth Forbes magazine has put at $18 billion, recently gave the foundation $2 billion worth of shares in his company.

Those newly donated shares are being used to start an education-focused university in Bangalore and to expand and spread programs like the one here in Uttarakhand and a handful of other places to reach 50 of India’s 626 school districts.

The size and scope of Mr. Premji’s efforts are unprecedented for a private initiative in India, philanthropy experts say. Even though India’s recent rapid growth has helped dozens of tycoons acquire billions of dollars , few have pledged such a large sum to a social cause.

“This has never been attempted before, either by a foundation or a forprofit group,” said Jayant Sinha, who heads the Indian office of Omidyar Network, the philanthropic investment firm set up by Pierre Omidyar, the eBay founder.

Underfunding in Nagla’s school district is pervasive. But so are glimmers of the benefits that might come through efforts like the Premji Foundation’s.

Surjeet Chakrovarty, now a 15-yearold secondary school student, is a graduate of Nagla and still visits his old school regularly. Surjeet aspires to become a poet and songwriter - something he attributes to the encouragement of his former teachers at Nagla. “My teachers here gave me so much motivation to write,” he said.

One of those Nagla teachers, Pradeep Pandey, shared credit with the Premji Foundation and its assistance in developing new written and oral tests.

“Before, we had a clear idea of the answers and the child had to repeat exactly what we had in mind,” Mr. Pandey said. “We can’t keep doing what we did in the past, and pass them without letting them learn anything.”


By VIKAS BAJAJ