I am from Keonjhar, one of the most backward and mineral rich district of India. Around 50% of people stay below poverty line, and their living conditions are worst. People have to drink water from the potholes, here basic health, living conditions is a distant dream. Many a times I ask myself, why even after so many years of independence, government is unable to provide the basic necessities of life to the people. Many govt. schemes are there but why the actual beneficiaries are not being benefitted by these. During one of my Internship, I travelled extensively to multiple parts of my district and what I had witnessed is hard to believe.Living conditions of most of the people are far away from what is projected by the government.Since liberalization, tremendous wealth has been created, however it has yet to reach people, and these below poverty line people constitute a major percentage in India.
Seeing all this, I and some of my friends in the year 2017 started to help the people in whatever way possible. We spread awareness about different government programs, helped 100s of children to get admission in the schools through RTE25 and Ekalavya Model Schools, helped to get enrolled in the Health Insurance Scheme by Govt. of Odisha, and seeing the impact we brought in the lives of people we formally registered the organisation in 2021, with sole aim of helping people get basic amenities.
I had observed that youths like me, don’t have the enough knowledge regarding the opportunities available to us, I was lucky that I got to know about TISS and moved, learnt, and now I want to help other youths of my community. We this motive, I founded Opportunity Cell with the aim of bridging the gap of educational opportunities among the youths and today more than 1 Million visitors visit our portal every month, and in the future we are planning to introduce courses which will teach the youths relevant employable skills so that they can earn and uplift themselves.
