Poverty in India: a problem on a huge scale

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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.

BSS Students Write Poems for Peace

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Poems for Peace is a cultural exchange between youth worldwide.

The aim is for people to gain compassion for other ways of living and thinking and to transcend racial, religious, socioeconomic, physical and intellectual differences.

Participants are encouraged to contemplate the meaning of peace, where it abides, how it’s attained, how it’s destroyed and how as “peacemakers” they can contribute to world peace. The notion is that the poem is in the heart and can be expressed as a traditional poem, prayer, letter, story or illustration.

Crusader Sees Wealth as Cure for Caste Bias

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When Chandra Bhan Prasad visits his ancestral village in these feudal badlands of northern India, he dispenses the following advice to his fellow untouchables: Get rid of your cattle, because the care of animals demands children’s labor. Invest in your children’s education instead of in jewelry or land. Cities are good for Dalit outcastes like us, and so is India’s new capitalism.

My Story by Helga Frech

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Located on the outskirts of Varanasi is a small and simple school — Buddha’s Smile School. The space for the students is very restricted, and classrooms are of only 3 walls and a roof. In a confined area. Less than 200 m2. 220 Untouchables carry of their daily studies. They sit on small benches, and more…

Underprivilaged Children must be given Special Care

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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.

India’s children and the Class Struggle

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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.