Projects

Cheo Project
The Cheo Project provides basic aid, education and healthcare to the Paharia tribe in Bihar.

Navsarjan Trust
Navsarjan Trust works exclusively with Dalits in the rural state of Gujarat, using legal action to enforce laws mandating equality. This article from IndiaWorld paints a picture of the organization.

Vidhayak Sansad
Vidhayak Sansad provides a wide range of programs to unionize and strengthen the bargaining power of migrant tribal workers employed as bonded laborers in the state of Maharashtra. Through schools for child laborers and unions for bonded laborers, Vidhayak Sansad strives to educate a community to better protect itself and its interests.

PREPARE
The Adivasi Empowerment Project and the Dalit Development Project are subsidiaries of PREPARE, a 15-year old relief organization operating in South India.

National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights
The National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights lists atrocities against Dalits and strategies for dissolving caste in India.

Street children and child labor
According to OneWorld.net, there are over 18 million children living on the streets of India. Many of these children are alone; many turn to drugs, alcohol and prostitution to cope with their situations. All of them live from day to day concerned with survival, food and shelter. Children often leave behind impoverished families in rural eastern and northern villages to live on the streets of big cities like Mumbai in the hopes of not burdening their families. Additionally, children are sometimes sold by their families into indentured labor, their wages sent home to support other siblings, pay for dowries and repay unbearable debts. Most notably, the carpet, textile, and beedi, or hand-rolled cigarette, industries have received international attention for the widespread use of child and bonded labor. While child labor is officially illegal, labor laws are rarely enforced, and many children, afflicted by homelessness and/or poverty, are forced to fend for themselves. Born into the cycle of poverty, street children are doomed to spend their entire lives on the streets unless someone intervene to affect drastic changes.

Articles

Working Children Get Organized
Changemakers.net is an initiative of the Ashoka Foundation to encourage social entrepreneurship through the internet. This April 2000 entry from the Changemakers.net site announces the creation of Concerned for Working Children, a union of street children in Karnataka, including a spectacular photo essay.

India's Tiny Children
This article by Laura Bobak in The Ottawa Sun details the lives of children employed in the textile and sports equipment industries in the Punjab.

Global March Against Child Labor
The India page of the Global March Against Child Labor posts statistics on child labor, slavery, trafficking and prostitution.

The Small Hands of Slavery
This 1996 Human Rights Watch Report details abuses against Indian children sold into slavery.

Organizations

Child Relief and You
CRY (Child Relief and You) is an organization that funds and monitors education and welfare programs throughout India and the U.S.

Child in Need Institute
The Child in Need Institute has been helping street children and homeless mothers in Eastern India for the past 25 years.

Bal Mazdoor
The Bal Mazdoor, or "Children's Labor", Union educates child laborers about their rights, offers vocational training to improve the status if street children and provides emergency and preventative healthcare. The Union includes both a Special Action Group that responds to the health emergencies of street children, and a Bal Sabha ("Children's Council") which meets monthly to discuss crucial issues. The organization also runs a restaurant called Butterflies in New Delhi, a cooperative venture which is used to train street children how to start their own businesses. The founder, Rita Paicker, is an Ashoka Fellow.

Bal Mazdoor Union
Rita Panicker, founder
Butterflies
U-4 Green Park Extension, 1st Floor
New Delhi 700016
India
Tel: 011-616-935/619-1063
Fax: 011-619-6117

People with Disabilities
Studies estimate that there are over 60 million Indians currently living with disabilities. Even more striking, 70% of disabilities in India could have been prevented through simple vaccinations, nutrition, and prenatal care. Polio is still a major disease on the subcontinent, with the polio vaccine a rare luxury in many rural and poor areas, leaving millions of Indians afflicted with irreversible disabilities. India accounts for over half of the polio cases in the world. While the Indian government has made significant strides in preventing, diagnosing and rehabilitating people with disabilities through the 1995 Persons with Disabilities Act, many economic and cultural factors influence the mistreatment of the disabled. Disabled people are more likely to be denied access to basic education and healthcare, leaving them without means of steady employment and forcing many disabled people to scrape together a living from begging. Additionally, some families see disabled children as extreme embarrassments and unbearable economic burdens, with abandonment and home incarceration a frequent reaction to family members with disabilities. In the past decade, NGOs have made great strides in changing these perceptions of the disabled in India, but there is still a lot farther to go, including the eradication of polio and other preventable diseases that cause disabilities.

Articles and Information

Disability: Challenges vs. Responses
This site from HELP, an on-line library dedicated to informing the Indian public about public health and the medical community, posts an archive of Indian government documents on policies towards people with disabilities.

Legislative Support for Education and Economic Rehabilitation of Persons with Disabilities in India
For a historical look at Indian governmental policy on the disabled with special reference to the blind and deaf, read this paper from the Asia and Pacific Journal on Disability.

Chief Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities
The official governmental website of the Indian Chief Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities posts the text of the 1995 Persons with Disabilities Act and is a great source of general information.

Debates and Views

Integration of Differently Abled Children at Amar Jyoti
This academic paper by researchers at the State University of New York at Potsdam advocates the integration of disabled children into mainstream educational facilities, as in the Amar Jyoti schools in Delhi.

Organizations

Harmony Home
The Harmony Home is an organization in Tamil Nadu that educates and provides medical attention to children with emotional and physical disabilities.

Sanjeevani Seva Sangam
The Sanjeevani Seva Sangam, meaning "the life-giving service community" in Hindi, is a federation of 13 women's organizations in Madhya Pradesh that provide education, healthcare, employment and equipment to people living with disabilities.

Institute for Remedial Intervention Services
The Institute for Remedial Intervention Services organizes educational and medical programs for people with autism in Chennai, Tamil Nadu.

Clarke School for the Deaf and Mentally Retarded
The Clarke School for the Deaf and Mentally Retarded in Chennai has been helping diagnose and educate children with disabilities for over thirty years.

Thakur Hari Prasad Institute
The Thakur Hari Prasad Institute, named after the social welfare worker who founded the organization, is a UN-registered NGO providing comprehensive education and job training to disabled children.

Samuha
Samuha, meaning "a collection of people" in Hindi, is an organization that works with disabled and HIV positive people in Karnataka through intervention centers.

Science and Technology
Over the past decade, booming technological markets in Pune, Bangalore and Hyderabad have given international acclaim to India's infotech industry. Despite the great extent to which Indians have participated in the information revolution, the vast majority of Indians are still left behind on the under-served side of the digital divide. Given that two-thirds of the world has never used a telephone, and many more Indians do not have access to clean water and medical supplies, basic technological advances like computers and the internet have had little effect on many populations in India. Some NGOs have begun to work on this divide, communicating basic information on healthcare, agriculture and literacy through the internet in order to develop rural and under-served areas throughout the country. For example, a few rural villages now provide up-to-date medical and agricultural information online in a way that is easy for people with even the most rudimentary of primary education to understand. In this regard, the internet can have a real effect on the basic quality of life in India, disseminating crucial information to the neediest of the poor. While analysts project that India's active Internet use will reach 9 million in 2003 from 270,000 in 1999, this boom in internet activity must be more evenly distributed to have the greatest impact.

Articles

Connecting Rural India to the World
In this New York Times article dated May 28, 2000, journalist Celia Dugger reports on how some rural Indian villages are using the internet to improve quality of life.

Healtheon Founder Lines Up India Initiatives
This article from the March 18, 2000 edition of the Indian Express, is a familiar tale of a non-resident Indian in Silicon Valley setting up computer learning centers in Kanpur.

Clinton in India warns against the 'digital divide'
This CNN article reports Clinton's speech in Hyderabad warning against the growing digital divide between rich and poor in India.

Remarks by the President at Digital Divide Kick-Off
This text from President Clinton's speech on the digital divide in the U.S. uses both Rajasthan and Hyderabad as examples of what the internet can accomplish to close the gap between rich and poor.

Struggling with the Digital Divide
This paper is the result of a South Asia Networks Organization conference on the internet in the subcontinent.

The Internet and Developing Countries: A New Paradigm
This is a report of a United Nations Development Program conference in Bangalore. It's a great primer on using the internet for development in India.

Organizations

Digital Partners
Digital Partners, a new Seattle-based organization, is harnessing technological advances like the internet to alleviate poverty and address the gap between the rich and the poor.

Schoolnet India
Schoolnet India is an organization dedicated to harnessing the internet to promote interactive education via technology across caste, class, and disabilities.

World Wide Web Helps War on Poverty
This is the "Internet and Poverty" site of Netaid, a partnership between the United Nations Development Program, Cisco Systems, Akamai Technologies and KPMG LLP, which promotes international social activism through technology. While not specifically India-focused, this organization gives a good explanation of why the internet can improve quality of life around the world.

SDNP - India
The Sustainable Development Networking Program (SDNP) of the United Nations Development Program promotes the process of sustainable development through organized accessibility to and exchange of information. This is their India home page.

Suvidya Organization, Raichur District and Bangalore, Karnataka
Suvidya, meaning "good education," teaches basic and advanced mathematical concepts to middle school and high school students through hands on "math labs" in public schools. The founder, S.N. Gananath, believes that a basic mastery of mathematical principles is a necessary tool for success in contemporary technology-driven India and that the traditional methods of teaching mathematics in Indian schools are ineffective. In the coming year, Suvidya aims to establish 380 local math labs in Karnataka. The organization acknowledges the particular problems faced by both female and rural students and targets those populations in greatest need.