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 [...]

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 [...]

BSS couldn’t exist without it’s many supporters from all over the world. So often, it starts with a person visiting Sarnath and meeting Rajan at BSS. And that’s exactly what happened with Geir Davidsen from Etne in Norway. He decided to help and created a fund-raising wonder by inspiring people in his community, especially the [...]

Lisa and Phillip, thank you for supporting our art classes, Pankaj’s Dream! Without you, we would not have been able to continue them. Your gift was a godsend to us, and we are grateful for it! To our angel Donna Peter, our most heartfelt thank you for your recent extra support that provided blankets to [...]

Various studies have revealed that poverty can be reduced by sending children from India’s disadvantaged groups to schools instead of sending them to work. If a child is in school, adults of his/her family will get work from where the child used to work. When the child of family goes for work then, adults of that family generally sit idle and the wages earned by the children are ill spent by their family. The employers prefer to engage children on work rather than adults so that they have to pay less wages to children. In this way children are exploited.

Fifty years into Independence, India’s children have little to celebrate: 6.3 crore (63 million) of them are still out of school. This despite the constitutional directive urging all states to provide “free and compulsory education for all children until they complete the age of 14 years”. The Constitution envisaged fulfilling this promise by 1960. Yet, if present trends continue, India is still 50 years away from reaching the goal.

India’s 17 years of economic change have widened the gap between rich and poor. More than a quarter of the population lives below the official poverty line, subsisting on roughly $US1 ($1.04) a day; one in four city dwellers lives on less than 50 cents a day; and nearly half of all children are malnourished. ->> SMH | Read the Full Story

Toward the end of 2007 we were extremely worried that the children’s food funding was ending in February 2008 and that we hadn’t been able to find a sponsor. Then a miracle occurred:

Geir, we want to thank you and your family, all the children and adults from Etne including the newspaper Grannar and Etne Sparebank who donated NOK 15,000. What you have accomplished has made a huge and highly significant difference and I wish you could have been in Sarnath yourself to see the happy smiling faces and the magnificent Tata Bus your funding has made possible.