Tibetan Children’s Village (TCV) – Suja was founded in 1986 by The Cabinet Secretariat of the Tibet Administration (Kashag) with prior objective of providing education opportunity for those adult who escaped from the Chinese oppression in 1980s. It is located in the Bir settlement about 75 km from Dharamsala. In the beginning the school was called New Tibetan School with strength of 68 adult students. Later in 1990, the Kashag entrusted the responsibility of running the school to Tibetan Children’s Village (TCV). Tibetan Children’s Village is an integrated charitable organization founded by the late His Holiness’s elder sister Mrs. Tsering Dolma. The mission of TCV is to ensure that all Tibetan children under its care receive a sound education, a firm cultural identity and become self-reliant and contributing members of the Tibetan community and the world at large.
For TCV, it was a moment of great challenge as well as opportunity for assisting those newly arrived adult refugees. The school infrastructures, reorganizing and restructuring the education curriculum to fit in the TCV’s system was most challenging with keeping in mind the unique needs of 322 young adult newcomer students. Eventually overcoming all the odds, the school was awarded the Secondary and Senior Secondary affiliation to CBSE in the 2004 and 2012 respective years.
From its inception, this residence school has had 5 Directors, 4 Principals and dedicated staff have worked and committed in imparting quality education and looking after the well-being of the student. The present school’s total strength is 1,412 (704 male & 708 female) students. The students are supported by qualified 94 teaching and 52 non-teaching staff. For two consecutive years from 2017 and 2018, the school stood first rank among the all Tibetan Schools who appeared for the AISSC board examination. Ms. Dawa Lhamu with 91.8% was awarded the prestigious Sikyong Award for securing second position in the Arts stream in 2018.The school was also listed among the top 20 best residential schools in Himachal Pradesh state by Careers 360, a data-enabled and technology-driven Educational Products and Services Company. This is the first time a Tibetan school has been included in this listing.
Funding Provided by CTA
Annual: INR1.4 crores (USD 205,882)
2016-2019: INR 4.5 crores (USD 661,764)
CTA has been supporting the school since 1991. The school receives an annual grant of around Rs 1.40 crores for the holistic development of the student. In the last three program years from 2016-19, CTA sanctioned a total grant of Rs 4.47 crores for the school’s education support from the PRM grant. The support has benefitted thousands of Tibetan refugee students who have graduated from TCV Suja and covers the cost of portion of both non-teaching and teaching staff salary, student’s education materials, medical, meals preparation and other operating cost of the school. The PRM grant is facilitated by the Social and Resource Development Fund (SARD), CTA.
