Hyderabad|India|January'2010: The number of students awarded the Fair & Lovely Foundation Scholarship in 2009 has gone up to 183 from 123 last year. This is significant, considering that 2009 is also the year of National Literacy Mission’s revamp as the National Mission for Female Literacy. Among these girls include 45 from Andhra Pradesh. Scholarships of upto Rs 1 lakh each are offered for any Graduate, Post Graduate and Doctorate Courses in India. This covers the total cost of education (including tuition fee plus over and above tuition fee incurred by the candidates to complete their courses.

Fair & Lovely Scholarships awards scholarships to women with aptitude, drive and the ambition to carve a place of pride for themselves in society, but do not have the financial strength to realize their dreams.

Some of these girls who got scholarship include Durgabhavani Jangam, daughter of agricultural labour get scholarship to pursue M.Tech; Anuja Parigi, a daughter of a mechanic wants to pursue graduate degree in Engineering, Asia Bagwan who due to untimely death of her father gets support from Fair & Lovely to complete her MBBS; Kolan Sandhya daughter of a poor farmer gets scholarship to get graduate degree in Computer Science & Engineering; MVSR Madhuri who lost her father at 3 and now her mother doing tailoring jobs to support their livelihoods and education gets scholarship to complete her B.Tech in Computer Science. There are many such poor yet brillant girls awarded from Adnrha Pradesh to fulfill their dreams.

“Fair & Lovely Foundation Scholarship has been doing stellar work in empowering the girl child. It only shows what all Corporate India can do to educate the underprivileged and also contribute in creation of skilled assets for the country.

With a pan-India focus, the Fair & Lovely Foundation Scholarship helps academically brilliant girls from the lowest economic strata of the society fulfill their dreams of higher education.

Mr. Govind Rajan, Category Head, Skincare, Hindustan Unilever Limited said, “Women’s empowerment is linked to the India’s growth story. Look at the National Literary Mission. It was renamed to make 70 million people — 60 million of them women — functionally literate by 2012. We, at HUL, also believe that education is the key to upliftment of the girl child and women in the country. The Fair & Lovely Foundation Scholarship is a humble but vital step in support of this belief.”

Apart from course fees, the Fair & Lovely Foundation Scholarship also supports the economically-backward girls with accommodation, books and stationary costs.

This time around, the Fair & Lovely Foundation scholarship’s special focus was on Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. These states are caught in a vicious circle of their own, with lower income, education and service levels, abject poverty and lack of development. The Fair & Lovely Foundation Scholarship has brought a sizable number of girls from these corners of the country to the mainstream and they are being given all the assistance then need to fulfill their dreams of becoming graduates, post-graduates and doctorates.

The Fair & Lovely Foundation scholars are selected with the help of a unique screening-and-interview system that takes into account the candidates’ academic performance, economic background and also, the drive to excel.

This year, the interview-based selections were held in Hyderabad, Bangalore, Chennai, Kolkata, Lucknow, Mumbai and Indore this year, and involved an august panel of eminent personalities from various fields.

This is the seventh year in running for the coveted scholarship, and as in the past, thousands of applications were received by the Fair & Lovely Foundation even this year.

In seventh year these scholarships was extended to graduate studies owing to requests from our consumers. Scholarships of up to Rs l lakh each (approximately 1818 euros) are awarded to these deserving young girls from across the country, for any graduate, post- graduate and doctorate courses within India. Fair & Lovely Foundation has awarded over 600 and more deserving girls since 2003.

Reachout's News Bureau
January' 2010