In 2018, Sanjhi Sikhiya's founders walked into a government primary school in rural Punjab and saw something data could not capture: resignation. Teachers waiting for instructions from a distant bureaucracy. Parents who had given up on the school. A Sarpanch who assumed it was not his problem.
Punjab's government school system covers 12,000+ rural schools and is deeply centralised. Teachers are overburdened by administrative requirements and receive no training tailored to their specific conditions: single-teacher schools, multi-grade classrooms, villages where children are first-generation learners. Communities are often unaware of their own rights and responsibilities towards the school.
67% of Class III students in Punjab cannot read a Class II text. The problem is not resources. It is the absence of belief that the people closest to the school can change anything.
We created CTP because real change has to start from within. Not with better curriculum or more inspectors. With the belief, in every teacher and every Sarpanch, that they can actually make something different happen.
CTP works at the cluster level, a group of 10-12 geographically proximate government schools.
Cluster Academic Meetings (CAMs) bring teachers from neighbouring schools together every month. Teachers bring real problems from their classrooms, facilitate peer discussions, try solutions, and report back the following month. Facilitation progressively transfers from Sanjhi Sikhiya to the teachers themselves. A six-dimension Teacher Maturity Matrix tracks each teacher's journey across classroom practice, facilitation, and community engagement.
Gram Sikhiya Sabhas (GSSs) convene the elected village council, parents, and teachers around one question: what does this school need, and what can we do about it? The meeting activates governance structures that already exist in every village but have gone dormant. Panchayat members begin integrating school development into village planning. School Management Committees shift from passive signatories to active champions.
In Bibipur village, enrolment had fallen to 18 students. After the community took ownership through this process, enrolment rose by 177%. No external intervention. The community simply decided the school was worth fighting for.
Over time, we track whether communities are initiating action without prompting: contributing resources, running enrolment drives, raising school needs in Panchayat meetings. That sustained ownership is the outcome we are building towards.
CTP has grown from 2 clusters in 2018 to active work across 4 districts and 37 clusters in Punjab, directly reaching 298 schools, 1,066 teachers, and 24,970 students.
The most significant proof of scalability: 98 clusters in Patiala district now operate entirely without Sanjhi Sikhiya's presence. The district administration observed what CTP produces and embedded the approach into official government operations across the entire district, covering 824 schools, 2,486 teachers, and 72,000+ students. That is scale the government chose, not scale we drove.
In FY 2023-24, including partner-led clusters, CTP reached approximately 1,176 schools and 119,000 students.
Over the next 2-3 years, the goal is to expand into two new Punjab districts, commission rigorous external evaluation of CTP's impact, and build a practitioner community of teachers and officials that sustains peer learning without depending on any single organisation.
Visit sanjhisikhiya.org or contact Simranpreet Singh Oberoi at simranpreet@sanjhisikhiya.org. Teams interested in adapting CTP can request a facilitated orientation session. The model can be contextualised for any cluster of 8-18 government schools with existing administrative oversight structures.
