HELP THEM ..... TO LEARN...

The Students of Symbiosis Infotech Campus (SIC) have come together to contribute towards providing better quality education for slum children. The group is called Prayatna and their intention is to enrich the experience that the slum children get from the government run schools that they attend.


“These children do attend their government-run schools, but they needed that extra looking after to make themselves more competent. We not only take classes for them on our campus but have also got them admitted in a good English medium school for their better education,” says Chauhan, adding, “We have to catch them young as it becomes difficult to shift them from a Hindi or vernacular medium schools to a English medium one.”


The really interesting part is the source of the funds for this activity:


Not neglecting the funds, he said that they were paying Rs 7000 per children to the school, which in turn takes care of all the needs of the children – from fees to books to uniforms. When asked about the source of funds, Chauhan explained that SIC students conduct film festivals and games through which they collect money for the children. They also collect old clothes and books from SIC students. However the noble idea was of alumni adopting the children.


It is truly wonderful that as part of their college activities the students are able to source funds and provide for a better education for the lesser privileged children of our country. We hope that this model will act as a source of inspiration for many other colleges across India to give back something to the society.

And the work just doesn’t seem to stop at providing classroom education, as the article goes on to say:


Apart from the schooling, they also have many activities lined up for the kids.”We bring them to our campus five times a week and give them classes for english, maths, science, personality development, general knowledge and so on. We also take them for games and sports. We show them inspirational documentaries,


One of the objectives with which The Better India was started is to spread awareness and create a sense of social contribution amidst our citizens. Hence, for us it is heartening to note that today’s students are already treading this path of spreading welfare! We wish Prayatna all the very best in their ongoing endeavors and look forward to many more school children receiving quality education from SIC and other similar college bodies.

HELP THEM....TO SMILE

Loneliness and social isolation are dominant motifs of city street life. Around half the homeless men and women, boys and girls whom we spoke to in Patna, Chennai, Madurai and Delhi said they never celebrated festivals, three fourths said they had no friends whom they could trust and more than half felt that they belonged to no community, even of the homeless. Sixty-two out of 85 homeless people we spoke to in Patna sadly felt they had never been helped by anyone — government, neighbours, charity — during their entire lives on the streets.

The majority of homeless people, in all cities, of all ages and gender, find one kind of solace in their loneliness in some kind of drugs or intoxication. Most street children are introduced to the easy but deadly escape from pain and loneliness offered by soft drugs early in their days on the streets. Thinners are readily available at any stationery shop for Rs. 25 a bottle. Shopkeepers know that the children who buy these are not using them for painting, but they do not hesitate to sell to the street urchins who flock to their stores. Two bottles are enough for a day for one child. They soak a rag and inhale the fumes of the solution, and it transports them to a world free from hurt and violence. But it also destroys their lungs, rendering them vulnerable to TB, and damages their brains and memory. Many children graduate to hard drugs like smack, but fortunately others are able to steer themselves away, as they know that for those who succumb to smack, it is virtually the end of the road

Sharing to survive

Street boys, cut off from their families in their village and alone in the city, tend to live in gangs, sharing everything — food, clothes, intoxicants, sleeping under the same sheet — teaching each other trades like rag-picking and recycling drinking water bottles, protecting each other from street violence and the police, and feeding each other in sickness.

They find other ways of enjoying life as well, some healthy, some less so. Street entrepreneurs have set up makeshift video parlours, especially on lanes where they sell their rags and waste. These are nothing more than a space marked off by faded curtains with a television set. For five rupees, you can watch as many films as you like. The parlours are packed with the rejects of the city, street boys and lonely migrant workers, rickshaw-pullers, head loaders, construction workers, watching raptly Hindi cinema interspersed with pornographic films. But a third of the homeless people we spoke to (and nearly half those in Patna) say they have no source of recreation at all; they could not afford to enjoy for even brief moments to savour the glitter of city lights.

HELP THEM....TO SURVIVE

Two million slum children die every year 

Our countries growing status as an economic superpower is masking a failure to stem a shocking rate of infant deaths among its poorest people.

Nearly two million children under five die every year in India – one every 15 seconds – the highest number anywhere in the world. More than half die in the month after birth and 400,000 in their first 24 hours.

A devastating report by Save the Children,  reveals that the poor are disproportionately affected and the charity accuses the country of failing to provide adequate healthcare for the impoverished majority of its one billion people. While the World Bank predicts that India's economy will be the fastest-growing by next year and the country is an influential force within the G20, World Health Organisation figures show it ranks 171st out of 175 countries for public health spending.

Malnutrition, neonatal diseases, diarrhoea and pneumonia are the major causes of death. Poor rural states are particularly affected by a dearth of health resources. But even in the capital, Delhi, where an estimated 20% of people live in slums, the infant mortality rate is reported to have doubled in a year, though city authorities dispute this.

Save the Children says millions of mothers and their babies are simply not getting the skilled medical care they need, and the poor, in particular, have been left behind.

India's state healthcare system is supposed to be open to all, offering access to government-run hospitals. The reality is that, while government hospitals often offer high standards of care, they can be overcrowded, and if they are short of the required medicines patients are asked to pay for them themselves. In the meantime, private health care has surged and now accounts for the majority of India's medical provision, giving access to world-class facilities for those who can pay or who can afford private insurance premiums.

According to the UK India Business Council, about 50 million middle-class Indians can afford private healthcare – a growing number but still a tiny fraction of the overall population – while the country still lags behind other developed countries, with only 0.7 hospital beds per 1,000 people compared with a global average of 4.

Many slum-dwellers are too far from hospitals to make use of their facilities, because they cannot afford to use private auto-rickshaws to reach them and there is no public transport. Instead they turn to quack doctors – a slightly cheaper option, but because they are unregulated and notoriously unreliable, one fraught with dangers.

According to the report, the national mortality rate for under-fives in the poorest fifth of the population is 92 in 1,000 compared with 33 for the highest fifth. The national average is 72.

The Save the Children report says nearly nine million children die worldwide every year before the age of five. India has the highest number of deaths, with China fifth. Afghanistan has the dubious distinction of featuring in the top 10 of total child deaths and of child deaths per head of population.

The charity accuses the world's leaders of a scandalous failure to meet the Millennium Development Goals, agreed in 2000, to cut child mortality by two- thirds between 1990 and 2015 and calls for a sharp increase in health spending