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Right after IndiaFOSS 2025, I was headed to the Wipro Campus Guest House in Bangalore and spent the night there.

I was excited for our field visit to Don Bosco College, Yelagiri the next morning.

Well, the story starts way before that, but let’s park it for another day.

Azim Premji Foundation x Chetna x BWH

Hrishi from Azim Premji Foundation had invited Indu Ji (founder of CCWWS) and me to visit the Don Bosco College in Yelagiri, Tamil Nadu. You might think why? Because Azim Premji Foundation is considering opening a school of programming in my hometown: Jagdalpur, offering a similar diploma course that Don Bosco used to run when they started out. Now they run 3-year degree programs like BCA and BSc.

What’s special?

Raju from Azim Premji Foundation is from Don Bosco, Yelagiri. He also joined us for the visit. He didn’t know a single word of English when he joined DBC. And now, he leads the Frappe team at Azim Premji Foundation! They have alumni all over the world. This is what we wanted to know. How were they doing it? How were they taking a lot of these rural high-school pass-outs and turning them into competent IT professionals?

We want to do something similar in Jagdalpur. Take in under-privileged children (girls to start with) from rural/tribal areas of Bastar and put them through a rigorous 18-month residential Computer Science program. One more interesting thing is that Frappe Framework will be a core part of it.

The expected outcome is quality software developers, who go on to work in the IT industry and hopefully, the social sector. Even Azim Premji Foundation is looking for Frappe developers for appointment in various parts of the nation.

The History of DBC, Yelagiri

Fr Francis Guezou, a french missionary came to India in 1952. He founded BICS InfoTech (now Don Bosco College and BoscoSoft) in 1998 to provide professional computer education to the rural and tribal youth.

I was fascinated to know how he had envisioned that the Computer Science and IT fields were going to play a prominent role in the coming years.

The Curriculum

The primary piece I was personally interested in was the Syllabus. What do they teach? How do they teach?

After a walk around the campus, the faculty team was kind enough to gather for an all-hands meeting with us. They presented to us their guiding principles and processes.

First thing that caught our attention was the English language drill which was part of their curriculum. Initially, they used to teach students only English for the first 6 months. Now they have reduced it to a few weeks, but it still continues throughout the program. Fr. Thaddeus, principal of the college, suggested us to have only English training for the first 3 months. Then it becomes part time.

We went on to dig deeper into their BCA curriculum. I also shared about CS50 by Harvard (surprisingly, not many folks had heard about it). This has been my favorite curriculum for building computation thinking.

They also mentioned about IGNOU and how earlier they provided degrees through IGNOU’s correspondence program. Probably we could do something similar.

Relatable

Inside the campus, they also run an IT services company, called BoscoSoft. Here they employ graduates from the College. They also provide internships and hands-on trainings on real-world projects. I liked how both the college and the company are tightly integrated. Fr. Thaddeus is also the CEO of BoscoSoft. They now have a suite of products and more than 200 employees!

I started imagining if BWH Studios can play the same role for our students.

Next Steps

Indu Ji (from Chetna, Raipur) is going to manage the logistics (accommodation, food, financial and more), while I am entrusted with designing a comprehensive curriculum and training the students. We are requesting Azim Premji Foundation to fund the program.

We decided that a slow-paced version of CS50 along with hands-on project building would be good to start with. As I mentioned earlier, Frappe is also going to be part of the curriculum. The Chetna team has already short-listed 40 girls from remote villages and we are going to pick out 15 from them for the pilot program. After putting a lot of thought on what to name the course, I suddenly realized that the vehicle code of Jagdalpur is CG17 and the course is inspired by CS50, hence, CS17!

I will be sharing more in the coming days.

Excited to see how this unfolds!