PACT Foundation brings AI-Ready Smart Classroom to 102-Year-Old Pernem School

Goa Khabar : PACT Foundation today launched its Happy School Project at Kamleshwar High School, Deulwada, Korgao, run by the Kamleshwar Shikshan Prasarak Sanstha, an educational society serving the children of Korgao since 1924. The initiative brings an AI-ready smart board and upgraded teaching-learning infrastructure to the school, making it the latest addition to PACT Foundation’s expanding network of rural school transformations across Goa.

Korgao is no ordinary village. It finds mention in the Korgao copper plates of the Kadamba dynasty, among the earliest written records of governance in the Konkan region, and the Sanstha that runs the school predates Indian independence by twenty-three years. For the children of Deulwada and the surrounding hamlets of Pernem, the new smart classroom now connects a thousand-year-old village to a twenty-first-century classroom.

The initiative contributes directly to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4 (Quality Education) and supports SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities) by closing the urban–rural learning divide in Goa, while aligning with India’s Viksit Bharat 2047 vision of preparing rural youth for the knowledge economy.

Delivering the opening address, Ramchandra (Sudan) Barve thanked PACT Foundation for stepping in at a moment when the school most needed an upgrade in teaching and learning methods. “Our village needed this upgrade in teaching and learning, and PACT Foundation has come in as a saviour to support us,” he said. “I ask our students to make the fullest use of these new facilities, to study with sincerity, and to aim high so that one day each of you will make this village proud.”

Speaking as Chief Guest, Dr Ashwin Fernandes, Founder and President of PACT Foundation, placed the project within the larger vision of Viksit Bharat 2047 and underlined that the students of Pernem are not bystanders to India’s transformation but active participants in it. He noted “Korgao has already given India its freedom fighters and its artists. The time has now come for Korgao to give India its doctors, its scientists, its engineers and its innovators. These smart boards are not just screens on a wall, they are a doorway to that future. Use them well, and come back one day to make this village even prouder.”

With this project at Kamleshwar High School, the Happy School Project adds another Pernem school to PACT Foundation’s growing footprint of rural education initiatives in Goa, which also includes the Goa Super 100 scholarship programme and community youth development activities.