Democracy In Schools Having Action – DISHA

Our school programme, DISHA, is practical, innovative and aligned to our national and state curricula. DISHA provide opportunities for curiosity, exploration and team work. It is designed to invigorate both the teachers and the students and invite critical thinking, application and a motivation to study civic responsibilities and citizenship education.

Schools that participate in Desh Apnayen’s School program – DISHA (Democracy in Schools Having Action) have four major benefits:

  • Access to unique, supplementary and innovative civics content mapped to curriculum
  • Access to Fellowship Program for teachers (Online teacher training workshop available)
  • Access to detailed citizenship club operational guidelines and participation in an unique social media platform
  • Participation in citizenship themed inter-school events

Desh Apnayen’s school programmes are innovative, engaging, exciting and provide experiential learning of civics responsibilities and citizenship. Our school programme DISHA, is designed to spark a WILL (inspiration) in the student community and develop SKILLS (Knowledge) to embrace a new consciousness, understand the levels of our government, how we operate as a nation and to question lethargy and complacency. This programme also gives information about the importance of value education in school curriculum.Through DISHA, we enable children to become mature citizens, articulate in thought and action. Our programmes gives information about importance of value education in school curriculum.


Unique Content

Content is designed for in-classroom learning and can be seamlessly aligned with Maharashtra state board, CBSE, ICSE and IGCSE boards. The civics topics content developed by Desh Apnayen is mapped to the curriculum topic wise, and grade wise with the board the school follows. The content is innovative, interactive and engaging with a focus on value inculcation and behaviour modification among young students. Keeping a teacher’s ease at heart, all our content is structured and well researched where modules come with their own session plans, units, audio visual aids, civics responsibilities and citizenship worksheets and interesting project ideas. The program is pragmatic, something that can be done in the already allotted time schools have set aside for civics. The content is fun to teach and learn and yet enables scoring well at the exams. Armed with a new perspective though, it is significantly more powerful, engaging and change making.


Fellowship for Teachers

At the heart of all our work, is collaboration. An in-house team of experts at Desh Apnayen provides excellent pedagogical and content related training to the teachers of the school that adopts the programme, and continues to hold their hand through out the academic year. We take your feedback, monitor the implementation and help you assess the value you have created in your class through our unique impact assessment framework.

We start with students to steer their natural enthusiasm and curiosity in a meaningful direction. Teachers are our partners in progress in this journey – the ones who make all results possible, who sow the seed of that one idea that can change the world. Teachers are our guiding lights.

We provide teacher fellowship program online or offline (depending on the location of the school).


Citizenship Club - Experiential learning

Desh Apnayen encourages all partner schools to start a “Desh Apnayen Citizenship Club” in their schools. It aims to provide life-learning opportunities for our youth which significantly influence and benefit their development as committed Indian citizens using experiential learning.

The purpose of the club is to:

  • develop empathetic thinking, leadership skills and expose them to various civics and citizenship ideas,
  • inspire and train the students to be compassionate and responsible citizens,
  • achieve an augmented awareness of global social issues through a series of experiential, engaging and fun loaded activities: simulations, debates, quizzes, civics responsibilities and citizenship worksheet, art based activities, street plays, interaction with government officials, armed forces, police, role plays on civics topics, concept of citizenship education, values of democracy and more.
  • School initiated events like, competitions, lecture series, Guest speakers, and panel discussions.

Community Engagement Projects

School led civic engagement projects which are conducted by students – street beautification, inter-religious faith event and visit to nearby NGOs.