The Charitable Trust called The India Village Project started in Lawside RC Academy in 2006, inspired by the work of many other schools in Scotland which were forging links with many overseas communities, especially in the former British Commonwealth.

It is registered with the Office of the Scottish Charities Regulator, and has a board of Trustees and publishes annual Accounts and Reports.

Because of connections we had with the Marist Brothers we were able to make our own links with schools in towns and villages in the state of Tamil Nadu, in Southern India and especially the area around Mangamanuthu, where most of the population were Dalits .

Dalit is the name given to people who were formerly called "Untouchables" and under the old caste system were on the bottom rung of Indian society. Although the caste system has been formally abolished, hundreds of years of tradition have proved hard to clear away completely and the Dalits, who come from many religious backgrounds including Hindu, Christian and Muslim, remain firmly on the bottom rung of society and often have little access to education through poverty and other social circumstances.

The Marist Brothers, who arrived in India in 1974, are based in Tiruchirapalli (usually called Trichy), and have have set up schools and projects in Tamil Nadu and we chose to link up with a brand new High School in a village called Mangamanuthu, (although on some signs and maps it is labelled Vangamanuthu, because the V and M can often sound similar in Tamil.)

The School was called St Marcellin High School, after St Marcellin Champagnat, a French Priest, who founded a Religious Order at the end of the French Revolution to provide an education for the poorest children. The Brothers who joined his order, became teachers, and were known as the Congregation of the Marist Teaching Brothers by 1815, because Mary was the patron saint of the Order. They operate now in many parts of the world, often building schools in the poorest areas.

The Brothers in India continue to improve their existing schools and build new ones in villages and towns in Tamil Nadu. The photographs opposite show how St Marcellin's High School has been expanded since 2007 with a huge new wing being added to the original building.

The India Village Trust has collected money which it has used to help some of the Schools and the communities around these schools, At first it was inly In Mangamanuthu, where we started to rebuild some of the poorest houses in the village, and offered curricular help to the High School and bought extra equipment and furniture.

This year the India Village Project made a grant to them to enable them to buy a piece of land next to St Marcellin High School allowing the school to be expanded finally allowing pupils to be educated up to 6th year and sit University and College entrance examinations.

One of the projects we have offered to assist is Operation Rainbow, where the children and families affected by HIV can be helped with high protein supplements to their diet and the opportunity of an education, from which they would normally be excluded because of the fear that HIV has created in the wider community.

As other Schools and Groups have joined in we have been able to expand the number of schools and communities we can help.

We have managed to embed the ideas of global citizenship in the curriculum of many of the schools associated with the project and in St Paul's an annual feature is Mangamanuthu Week which is run in conjunction with the Ashram in Dundee.

The Bharatiya Ashram was established in 1995 to promote benefits for all, but primarily for ethnic minority clients of Dundee and surrounding areas, and is based in the Dudhope Centre. Pupils from St Paul's have appeared at events such as India Day, and dancers, musicians and catering demonstrators have come to St Paul's from the Ashram.

To sum up the aims of the Project are:

We are a Charity registered with the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator SC39667 and we are also registered to reclaim tax paid on donations from taxpayers through the Gift Aid scheme run by Her Majesty's Customs and Revenue CR61646.

Our accounts are published by OSCR on line and anyone who has access to a computer can access our details by entering our name at this address:

http://www.oscr.org.uk/search-charity-register/

So if you would like to help us financially why not fill in a Gift Aid form at the same time as you donate money to us . It means we can ask the HMRC for an extra 20% of the value of these donations and the extra money comes from the Treasury, not from you