Field diary — 17th September 2026, The Indian Public School
Four trophies stood in a row on the owner's desk, waiting. Gold and dark wood, a gold medallion in the centre of each, and inside the medallion a photograph of the teacher whose name was printed underneath.
We had taken the appointment with the school owner some time earlier. The plan was simple: come to the school on the 17th and hand over the Teacher of the Month awards for July.
What the Trophy Is Actually For
This is not a popularity prize, and nobody draws a name out of a hat.
Each trophy comes with a Teacher Performance Tracking Report — a printed sheet of charts covering the month: observed performance, ratings across categories, a qualitative analysis. The teacher gets the report at the same time as the trophy. The point is that she can see exactly what the award is based on, and exactly where the next month's work lies.
The report that comes with the trophy. The award is the summary; this is the evidence.
The categories printed on the trophies are worth noticing too, because they are honest rather than flattering:
Teacher
Award category, July 2026
Debjani Ghosh
Promising Future Teacher
Adrija Dutta
Developing Teacher
Sumali Sarkar
Developing Teacher
Anita Indra
Developing Teacher
Developing is not a consolation word here. It is a position on a ladder, and the whole point of giving someone a trophy that says developing is that there is somewhere to climb to.
One by One
The owner called the teachers into his office individually rather than assembling everyone in the yard. So the ceremony happened four times over, in a corridor against a yellow wall, each teacher getting her own moment instead of thirty seconds in front of a crowd.
Trophy in one hand, report in the other.
Each handover was its own small event.
The same yellow wall, the fourth time that morning.
The field executive's note on how it landed is the part worth keeping:
"They were very happy after getting this trophy for the first time. Adrija ma'am was very happy. She was very excited after getting the trophy."
First time. Not the first time this year — first time. These are teachers who have been doing this work for years, in a private school in rural Murshidabad, and nobody had ever handed them an object that said they were good at it.
The Owner Hands One Over
One decision that morning was deliberate. Rather than have the Krishworks team present every award, we asked the school's owner, Mr. Farooq Hussain, to present one himself.
The owner presented Anita Indra with her trophy — recognition from inside the school, not just from a visiting programme.
It matters who does the handing over. An award from an outside organisation is pleasant. The same award, placed in your hands by the person who runs your school, in front of your own colleagues, is a different thing entirely — and it stays after the visitors have gone.
Afterwards
With the trophies distributed, we sat down in the owner's room and talked for a while — about how the programme is running, what the next session should look like, and the renewal.
Mr. Hussain gave us his word that the renewal would be completed by December.
That is the business end of a day like this, and it is not separate from the trophies. A programme gets renewed when the people inside the school can see it working. Four teachers walking back to their classrooms holding a trophy and a performance report is, among other things, the most legible evidence of that there is.