Sandarbh - A Bimonthly Resource Magazine for Teachers
As per the famous quote by Alice Wellington Rollins “The test of a good teacher is not how many questions s/he can ask pupils that they will answer readily, but how many questions s/he inspires them to ask which s/he finds hard to answer.” Sandarbh, a bi-monthly magazine in Hindi that started in 1994 tries to serve this purpose by providing content in an easy to follow idiom, free of scientific and pedagogic jargon.
‘Sandarbh’ (meaning Context) started as a result of an effort to reach out to teachers to provide them a platform, beyond the set of teachers who were associated with Hoshangabad Science Teaching Programme (HSTP) and other direct engagement curricular initiatives by Eklavya. The magazine is aimed mainly at middle and high school teachers and students to deepen the conceptual understanding that helps in enriching the classroom transactions. Also it acts as a pedagogical tool with related content that helps facilitators to explore new processes and methodologies in the field of science, social science, language, maths and allied subjects, along with very many other aspects of education.
The magazine also majorly serves as a platform for teachers across the country to communicate about their classroom teaching experiences and the new innovative means they try and acquire towards making the classroom transactions and teaching meaningful and engaging.
In addition to generation of new material in Hindi, Sandarbh also makes available exceptional articles published in English to Hindi readers, sourced from a range of diverse print and digital magazines.
Entire archive of all the Sandarbh issues published till now is available on Eklavya website, both as pdfs and as easily accessible and searchable articles in Unicode. You can just type any string and access relevant articles from the large database of 1500+ articles in the Sandarbh database. Some of the original articles are also uploaded in English, and some articles originally written in Hindi have also been translated to English and made available to non-Hindi audience.
In addition to the magazine version that has a print-run of about 5000 copies, Sandarbh articles available on the Website have a large direct reach – to the extent that some of the articles have been accessed more than 25,000 times. In addition to most of the Eklavya initiatives, numerous organisations working in the field of teacher education, like Azim Premji Foundation, Vidya Bhawan Society, SCERTs of many states use Sandarbh articles as reading material for both content related workshops and courses on Science, Maths, Language, Social Sciences, and also for workshop on foundational aspects of education like Child development, Society & Education etc.
Immediately after Sandarbh was started in 1994, many organisations evinced interest in starting similar initiatives in other Indian languages. Two of them fructified – Sandarbh in Marathi that was originally published by Palakniti, Pune and later registered as a separate entity, Sandarbh Trust, has published more than 100 issues of Marathi Sandarbh till date. Similarly, Nachiketa trust, Dharampur (Valsad) has been publishing Sandarbh in Gujarati as an occasional publication, printing 2-3 issues every year.
While Sandarbh was supported through grants from MHRD for first ten years, till 2004, Eklavya continued to publish the magazine by cross-subsidising and internal resources for about ten years. Now since 2015, development and digitalisation of Sandarbh is partially supported by Triveni Education Trust.