The Aditya Birla Public School

This place is a bit different because we are right there with the Ultra Tech Cement Ltd crowd. The Aditya Birla Public School is located at the Awalpur Cement Project in Chandrapur. The pin code is 442917. If you drive down here, you’ll see the industrial chimneys in the distance. It’s a bit of a trek from the main town, so we’re a tight-knit community here. Most of the parents work at the plant, so everyone knows everyone else. The school building is solid, built to handle the heat and the dust that comes with being in an industrial area. We spend a lot of time wiping down desks because of that dust. It’s not the quietest place, but it has its own rhythm. The staff mostly lives nearby in the staff quarters, so we see each other at the market too. We don't have any fancy marketing people writing our stuff; it's just the principal and a few teachers who look after the paperwork. The playground is big, and when the sun sets, it’s actually quite nice out there. We focus on the basics here—making sure the kids have their books and the teachers have their chalk. There’s no big mystery to it. We just run the school according to the schedule and try to make sure the kids are getting through their syllabus without too much fuss. It is a practical environment for everyone involved.