Buddha's Smile School

‘The higher-caste students tell us that we smell bad,’ one girl said. Another added: ‘The ridicule we face prevents us from coming to school and sitting with higher-caste children.’ These girls from the hamlet of Khalispur, near the city of Varanasi, belong to the Mushara or ‘rat catcher’ community of eastern Uttar Pradesh, India.
Despite an [...]

Education systems in many of the world’s poorest countries are now experiencing the aftershock of the global economic downturn.
The 2010 Education for All Global Monitoring Report, released on 19 January, argues that the crisis could create a lost generation of children whose life chances will have been irreparably damaged by a failure to protect their [...]

Reuters AlertNet written by Nita Bhalla
NEW DELHI (AlertNet) – South Asian nations must promote breastfeeding and focus on better nutrition for under two-year-olds in order to reverse the worst rates of chronically undernourished children in the world, the U.N. said on Wednesday.
According to a new report by the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF), more than half [...]

The Hindu: India still has the largest number of illiterate adults in the world, but has made “rapid advances” in cutting down the numbers of school drop outs, a new UN report on education has said.
The Education For All-Global Monitoring Report, released here on Wednesday finds that out of the total 759 million illiterate adults [...]

Almost half of India’s children are malnourished; 1000 die every day from diarrhoea; hundreds of millions have no access to proper sanitation. These figures provide a grim counterpoint to the glitzy high-rises and designer shopping malls that have sprung up throughout the country’s major cities.