Page 100 - Demo

PVG Raju was focussed on education. He felt that education, especially higher education, needed to be democratised and made accessible to people who were hitherto deprived of it; women needed to come into the mainstream of education; and finally, education needed to be practical and lead to employment that would aid in nation-building. One of his first initiatives, as early as 1950, was distinctly visionary in that he decided to set up a College of Education. At that time there was no pre-existing institution offering a degree that was primarily designed to improve the quality of teaching. It was certainly the first in Madras state to offer a B.Ed degree and maybe one of the first in the country. He anticipated that a burgeoning of educational institutions in the country would result in a shortage of qualified people who could teach. Through the greater part of the 1950s when the institutions were dependent on his personal philanthropy, PVG Raju began to see the role education would have to play in the transformation of India into an independent prosperous country. He also began to develop definite ideas of how he wanted to contribute to this process. An interesting side-light is that when the Madras government wanted to take over the flourishing colleges of Music and Dance and that of Sanskrit, he was quite happy to go along. One supposes that supporting high culture did not form part of his priorities. An experience during the early 1950s helped concretise his thinking. Many students of the Maharaja College used to come to Vizianagaram during the day to attend classes and return to the surrounding villages in the evening. Since their lunch was a problem, his father Alak Narayan Gajapathi Raj had set up a choultry in 1933 to provide them with free boarding out of his personal funds. The organisational aspects 90