President Mr S. Dhanabalan's Statement Delivered At SINDA'S 11th Annual General Meeting

1. Over the last ten years, SINDA has evolved into a credible organisation and has become one of the pillars of the Indian Community. This is evident from the extent of community support for SINDA. We now have 2,200 volunteers, 10% of whom are non-Indians, helping us with our different programmes. Last year 72 organisations worked closely with SINDA to organise various programmes for the benefit of the community. Our programmes are well received. Enrolment in SINDAšs tuition programme STEP, for instance, has been increasing yearly and now caters for about 10% of our Indian students.
   
   
2. SINDA continued to introduce new and innovative programmes like Project Teach to meet the needs of the community. Project Teach is a home-tuition programme that caters for children between Primary 1 and Primary 3 from low income families whose academic foundations are so weak that they score below 30% in core subjects like English and Maths. If these children are not helped it will be difficult for them to progress to better educational streams. To help these children SINDA mobilised and trained volunteers to provide one-on-one tuition to these children. Volunteers coach these children for at least 2 hours a week. With the focused and individual attention of volunteers all the students in this programme have shown good improvement. The programme has also received positive feedback from schools and teachers.
   
   
3. Community support also helped us to bridge the emerging digital divide. In line with national initiatives, SINDA together with the IT Services Cooperative Limited developed IT SMART, a 3 hour programme that introduces computers and the internet. Priced affordably at only $10 this programme attracted more than 3,000 people in under six months. Of those trained, 30% were housewives and 15% were retirees.
   
   
4. In addition to this, we also offered advanced IT courses and promoted IT in a fun way through the IT Carnival. We teamed up with organisations like the Parents Advisory Group on the Internet (PAGi) and the Info-Comm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) to promote IT at all levels. To date, we have reached out to over 10,000 people through our various IT initiatives.
   
   
5. This year SINDA also adopted new approaches to reach out to specific target groups. Thil Thil Manathil, a two hour Tamil radio programme on Oli 96.8 FM was launched with the objective of engaging and raising community awareness on key challenges and issues facing us. Many of our events now weave serious messaging with 'fun' elements and are organised in a carnival like atmosphere. We have started a programme to visit the Indians families with school going children living in 1/2/3 room flats. Some of you may not be aware that SINDA volunteers visit more than 400 low income Indian homes a week through our various programmes like Project Read and Project Teach.
   
   
6. Our new approaches to reach out to specific target groups have been very well received. More than 70% of our students in our STEP programme come from families earning below $2,000. 16% of the STEP students received free STEP tuition while we gave out 406 bursaries to needy students. Our IT programmes were attended by over 30% housewives and 15% retirees. SINDA's Education and IT Fairs attracted more than 10,000 people while Chikkubukku Jam, the first
   Indian youth carnival at the NYC Park Orchard Road drew more than 1,000 teenagers and their parents.
   
   
7. Building on our existing strong links with the PAIAECs and other Indian organisations, we also stepped up our efforts to organise activities at the grassroots level.
   
   
8. SINDA has been successful in reaching out to the community with strong support from all of you. I would like to take this opportunity to express my sincere appreciation to our CPF contributors, other individual and corporate donors. Our CPF contributors helped raise $3.61 million for SINDA in 2000, compared with $3.44 million in 1999. We received $11,756 as donations from the GIRO check off system. The generosity of individual and corporate donors helped us raise $753,102 for SINDA.
   
   
9. I would like to thank every one of our volunteers and supporters. I would also like to appeal to every Indian Singaporean to continue contributing to SINDA, and to begin contributing if they are not doing so currently.
   
   
10. I would also like to place on record our appreciation to the members of the Board of Trustees and the Executive Committee for their involvement and service to the community. A special thanks goes out to Mr Dileep Nair who stepped down as Vice President in March 2000, Mr V.T. Arasu, and Mr D.D.Gupta who stepped down Term Trustees in December 2000. I would also like to thank all SINDA staff for their committed and conscientious service.
    
    
11. The past 10 years bears testimony to what we can achieve by working hand in hand as a community. I look forward to your continued support as we work towards uplifiting our community even further.
    
    

S. Dhanabalan
President, SINDA