Last year, APICS, an operations management organization, supported the construction of an orphanage in Southern India.

Sameer Prasad, professor of operations and supply chain management, said APICS is a networking organization that helps prepare students for industry. However, Prasad said the organization tries to do things beyond what is in their own field.

“I have a number of students [who] are working on the research class,” Prasad said. “One of the research classes ties in with the development work.”

Prasad, along with senior Lauren Burkhardt and [still need a name here], traveled to India over winter break to see the orphanage and hostel they supported.

The trip to India wasn’t like a study abroad program, Prasad said.

“What we wanted to do is active value,” Prasad said. “That’s a much more difficult task. If you just visit something, it’s entertaining [and] nice and you have experiential learning. But then the question comes in, ‘Well, what are you delivering?’ This is a real good question.”

Prasad said the students were doing this as part of an undergraduate research project.

Learning about the conditions people live with in rural India who are trying to get an education was one of the main reasons they went to India.

The hostel and orphanage provide many services, but education is the main one, Prasad said.

“In the third world, a large proportion of the children are not getting educated,” Prasad said. “There are many reasons for that but their circumstances are pretty difficult. Some children lose their parents and so their orphans. Families are very poor.”

Burkhardt said it means a lot personally to provide these services for the native people.

“It’s really an amazing experience for me to be able to combine things that I’m learning in class … to help people,” Burkhardt said.

Prasad said the families they try to help earn a mere $200 per year, whereas our operating cost to take care of a child is $300 per year. About 70 percent of the operational cost is food, which leads to the mal-nourishing of children, Prasad added.

Students have been learning valuable skills in classes that apply to the situation in India. Prasad said the most valuable skill is to do research and understand a very different setting.

Prasad said they are using the “hub-and-spoke” model and in the future, many hamlet schools will be installed in tribal villages. There are already two hamlet schools outside the hub, or the orphanage, and ten more are planned to be installed. Each hamlet will have around 30 students.

Along with the educational stream, Prasad said they will add a health care and agricultural streams as well as employment training. They are hoping to reach about 1,000 people through that, he added.

At 5:15 p.m. on April 26, a UW-Whitewater alumnus representing Emerson will be speaking to the APICS group about job opportunities in Hyland Hall room 1309. Prasad said students can come and learn about the organization at that meeting.