Building on Their Knowledge

The children’s library provides children in rural areas access to quality educational resources.
Photos courtesy of CASA India

The library was built in 2021 by UT students through a partnership between the nonprofit CASA India (Church’s Auxiliary for Social Action) and Projects with Underserved Communities (PUC), a collaboration between UT’s Cockrell School of Engineering and UT Social Work.

Since PUC’s inception in 2009, nearly 300 Longhorns have served more than 18,000 people as they’ve learned about themselves and the world around them. With compassion and care, UT students have worked on four continents, using their skills on community projects such as installing solar panels at a clinic for malnourished children in Guatemala, expanding a school in Tanzania, and creating access to clean water in Papua New Guinea.

These humanitarian engineering projects exemplify the Longhorn spirit and the University’s mission to increase its global impact.

“A university is tasked with generating knowledge and gathering different perspectives,” says Tanya Voss, assistant dean for global engagement for UT Social Work. “Now more than ever, it’s vitally important that we educate our students about different ways to find solutions to our common problems.”

Texas Global also prepares students with information particular to the culture of their destination, as well as general health and safety tips.

PUC concludes in the summer with the in-country completion of the project. The PUC teams, typically composed of six to eight engineering students and one social work student, work together to develop end-to-end solutions in collaboration with their chosen community.

Offering students the chance to connect across disciplines is a learning opportunity in itself.

“Social work is a connective discipline, helping to bridge between different needs, different communities, different people and different disciplines,” says Tanya. “Social work students who participate in PUC learn to believe in their ability to cross into other communities and have dialogues that allow them to find holistic and sustainable solutions.”

“One of the real-world experiences we’ve encountered in the last few years is inflation in construction costs. Fifteen thousand dollars doesn’t go as far as it used to,” says Janet. “PUC could not exist without the generosity of our donors.”

“For many, this might be the first time they’ve interacted with a resource-strained community,” says Janet. “Different opportunities exist depending on where you are. Understanding the lives, attitudes and experiences of other people is central to humanitarian engineering.”

PUC projects also provide other Longhorns with a research focus. In summer 2025, a group of students working with the President’s Award for Global Learning traveled to Kallathupatti to assess the impact of the children’s library on the village’s residents.

Among these students was Debarghya Chaki, a biomedical engineering student who is pursuing certificates in computational engineering and data sciences.

“We want to learn how the library has affected the village and how it has improved literacy,” he says. “One of the main goals of the library was to reduce child labor in Kallathupatti, and we want to assess its long-term effects and role in the community. We also want to evaluate the impact of literacy initiatives on rural villages and how that might be extrapolated for future projects.”

Debarghya has a particular interest in libraries and their impact on communities. When he emigrated from India at age 3, he spoke only Bengali. He remembers spending many hours at his local library in College Station to gain the language skills he needed to attend preschool.

“My mom would take me to the library every day, and that helped me learn English,” he recalls. The experience had an enormous long-term effect on his academic life.

“All through high school, I would go to the library to read and to study. It was a big part of what helped me,” says Debarghya, who aspires to go to medical school after graduating from UT in 2026.