NTR Trust, the not-for-profit trust of the Telugu Desam Party, working in the areas of education, livelihood, and others, will set up NTR Model Schools in each district of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana in the coming days.
The schools, presently with three branches in Hyderabad, Warangal, and Krishna districts, have so far extended education facilities to close to 3,000 underprivileged students, mostly orphans, within the schools as well as outside.
“We want to extend a helping hand to the underprivileged students so that they come out of the vicious cycle of poverty, factions, and extremism,” NTR Trust trustee and Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu’s son Nara Lokesh said.
‘Mentor The Hero’
He was speaking at the launch of the ‘Mentor The Hero’, another initiative of the Trust, seeking a helping hand from people in mentoring students from the underprivileged sections.
The programme aims at roping in mentors, experts, who could spare a few hours every month to interact with the students and help them hone their skills.
Mr. Lokesh said that the Trust was planning to expand its operations to cover at least 5,000 students in an academic year by 2020.
“The campuses of the schools operated by the Trust are far better than that of any for-profit campuses in the city,” he said.
The Trust had also tied up with for-profit organisations to impart training to unemployed youths so that they could become employable.
NTR Trust Chief Executive Officer T. Vishnu Vardhan said mentoring would help create diverse personalities among the youth, and the move was aimed at taking services of experts and making the Trust’s functioning more transparent and accountable.
Actor Manchu Lakshmi and IICT director S. Chandrasekhar spoke.
