The exhibit will feature photographs girls aged 13-18 years, living in the bastis of Santacruz and Ambernath, who attended photography workshops conducted by the Photography Promotion Trust for Vacha Trust.

Armed with cameras, these girls no longer remain mere subjects but are now behind the camera calling the shots. It is an attempt to subvert the digital divide that excludes poor girls from speaking out through electronic mediums.

Vacha Trust works with girls as well as mixed youth in several poor neighbourhoods in and around Mumbai.  It also creates, collects and disseminates resources on relevant issues. Vacha documents and advocates girlhood issues at various levels. This exhibition is part of an ongoing project called ‘Bole Kishori/ Girls Speak Out’ in which girls from socio-economically disadvantaged communities are given training through various workshops and encouraged to tell their own stories through writing, drawing, posters, newsletters and photo and video essays. They choose to document their daily life to tell their own stories.

For more details, contact:

Amrita: 9820778330/ Medhavinee: 9833476857

Project Vacha, Tank Lane Municipal School, Near Seasons’ store, Santacruz (w). Mumbai -400054.

Email: vachamail@gmail.com

Website: www.vacha.org.in

By Aditi Seshadri

It’s now been nearly two years since the watershed Right to Education Act 2009 — making education a fundamental right for every child between the ages of 6 and 14 years — was implemented in India but, as the recently published Annual Status of Education Report 2011 (ASER 2011) by NGO Pratham reveals, things are not going quite to plan.

One of the findings of the survey (which covered 6.3 lakh children across India in over 16,000 villages) is that enrolment in private schools continues to grow nationally – increasing from 18.7% in 2006 to 25.6% in 2011 – implying that faith in government-run institutions is diminishing. In fact, according to ASER 2011 data, 30-50% of children in the rural areas of Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Nagaland, Meghalaya, Punjab, Jammu & Kashmir, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh are enrolled in private schools.

There was a time when low-income families preferred to send their kids to work rather than to a classroom. But times, and aspirations, have changed with a growing number of poor parents seeing education as the way out of poverty. Despite this, it’s clear that parents are unwilling to put their faith in the state.

And with good reason: According to the ASER 2011 findings, more than half of the students in Class V in rural India cannot read the text taught in class II in 2011. In fact, across many North Indian states, reading levels of Class V students declined by around 5% from 2010 to 2011. Also, although enrolment is high, there’s been a national level dip in actual attendance of classes in rural primary schools.

These numbers are an example of why more parents prefer to scrape together the money and place their children in low-cost private schools, which although following the same rote-learning teaching methods, can at least guarantee the teachers’ attendance, basic infrastructure and, often, English as the medium of instruction. Years of government school apathy led to the mushrooming of tens of thousands of private schools — run by trusts, charities, non-profit organisations, etc — to meet a growing demand for good education.

Now, there’s reason for these private institutions to worry: The Act has formulated a set of regulations — such as teacher-student ratios, classroom size and parental involvement — that schools must comply with, before 2013, or they could face closure.

This has led to predictions that private schools, already struggling to meet the norms, will have to close down by the droves. Union Education Minister Sibal has dismissed these claims, and was quoted as saying: “We’ve given them [private schools] three years’ time. We hope that is enough”.

But, what if it isn’t? While elite schools are filing lawsuits to bide time, what is going to happen to the schools that serve the poor?

Aditi Seshadri is Head of Communications at Mumbai Smiles NGO and Editor, Mumbai Action.

The views expressed here are the author’s  own and do not necessarily reflect that of any person or organisation.

The centre is looking for a dynamic woman to join a team that is setting up a chain of local language rural newspapers, Khabar Lahariya, run by Dalit, Adivasi and Muslim women across northern and central India. The job involves training and mentoring rural women to be journalists and agents, to run their own newspaper, as well as providing editorial and marketing support, visioning, networking and fundraising for the newspapers. The applicant should have some experience of working as a journalist, an understanding of gender and development issues and good writing skills in English and Hindi. The job is based in Delhi but involves frequent travel.

For details, contact Subhalakshmi Nandi at nandi1610@gmail.com

This will be followed by dancing and snacks.

The total cost of this event is Rs. 10,000. Kshana accepts cash or cheques in the name of Kshana Charitable Trust. You could donate in kind too.

The Ngo needs a lot of volunteers for this event, so if you would like to contribute your time, please call Esha on 7666877077 or Roshni on 9820750480 for any more details. You can also visit www.kshana.org.

Date: January 22, 2012

Time: 2pm – 6pm

Place: YMCA Boys Home, D.N. Nagar, Andheri (W) Mumbai – 400 053. Ph: 26303076/ 26303065

Also read Mumbai Action’s article on Kshana: Living in the ‘moment’

The startling fact is finding of NGO Pratham’s annual education survey of 6.3 lakh children across India in over 16,000 villages, who under the Right To Education Act are supposed to get quality education. A non-government report, an annual feature since 2005, evaluates the learning ability of students through a simple test based on what students are taught in their classrooms.

A survey conducted 18 months after watershed RTE law was implemented found that there is a decline of 5% in learning ability of students in schools even though the parents are employing more private tutors than ever before.

Around 52% in Bihar had age appropriate learning level in Pratham’s first survey in 2006. Five years down the line, the number has fallen to 29.9 %. Those in class V student, who can read a class II textbook, have the basic ability to learn.

Bihar is not alone. Similar decline in reading and mathematics was also reported from Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Rajasthan and Haryana even though many of the students surveyed were taking private tuitions.

“The tutor is a complementary factor and if the school functioning declines, the effectiveness of the tutor is lower too,” the survey report of 6.3 lakh children released by HRD minister Kapil Sibal said.

Source: Hindustan Times

The event aims to showcase the students’ learning of the project Green Ideas initiated by the Environment Department, State of Maharashtra executed by OASIS with the specific theme of Flora and fauna of Mumbai through their presentation talents.

The rationale of this project was that the Environmental assets are valuable and the welfare of Mumbaikars is tied up with preservation of those assets. Community participation is a must to protect our ecological treasures that have outstanding universal values and be a part of collective responsibility. The sparrows, vultures, feathered friends and native trees are vanishing from Mumbai.

Through this project, OASIS wanted to drive home to the students the ‘native flora and fauna’ existent in Mumbai and to survey the kind of flora and fauna that existed in the adjacent lane and the species that have witnessed the vanishing of the same. The project involved students right from research to action and it inculcated the sense of ownership and responsibility to retain the natural wealth of Mumbai along with its becoming a world class city.

The project culminates in an event on the evening of January 21, 2012, at the Carter Road Amphitheatre, Bandra (W) ,between 6.30 pm and 9.30 pm, where there will be performances by school students for the officers of the Environment Dept, State of Maharashtra, parents, school teachers and students as well as the general public.

Date: January 21, 2012

Time: 6.30 pm — 9.30 pm

Place: Carter Road Amphitheatre, Bandra (W)

Moradabad is a nondescript and scruffy city, 110 miles north of the Indian capital Delhi. Few have heard of it, despite its population of nearly five million. But it is about to become the site of an astonishing victory against a terrible disease.

Moradabad has long been the centre of one of the most stubborn concentrations of polio in India.

The disease is passed on by person-to-person contact and, with Moradabad’s poor inhabitants frequently travelling far across the country in search of work, outbreaks elsewhere have often been traced back to the city.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) stipulates that three years must pass without any cases of polio occurring before a region can be declared polio-free.

Moradabad, which only recently had 60-80 cases a year, is expected to qualify in 2012.

“This will be a wonderful thing – for us, for India, for the people of Moradabad,” said Dr Mohammed Arif, a public health specialist and organiser of anti-polio campaigns in the area.

There is a bigger national milestone on the horizon. If in India as a whole there are no more confirmed cases before 13 January, the country will have completed its first year without a new victim.

Read the full story by Jason Burke in The Guardian.

By Nilratan Shende

India has witnessed a series of changes and experienced transition from the repeated hunger and famine crisis to self-sufficiency in food, poor industrial growth and infrastructure to sizeable industrial and economic growth and not to mention scientific technological strides. It appears that India presents a dichotomous and paradoxical picture of accelerating economic growth on one hand and, persistent malnutrition, starvation deaths on the other. However, mere self-sufficiency in food does not ensure nutritional and food security at the regional and household level. Hunger and starvation deaths are brought into the spotlight by the media and intervention of the civil society organisation in the states of Orissa, Bihar, and Madhya Pradesh. Malnutrition deaths are not native to the regions of Nandurbar, Melghat, and Chandrapur in one of the developed state of India, Maharashtra.

Malnutrition deaths of children amidst self sufficiency of food brings to light importance of access to food, and underlines mere self-sufficiency is not adequate to ensure individual level food security. It is also reflected in the prevalence of malnutrition and starvation deaths among children in rural, tribal and pockets of slums in urban area. The availability of food stock on one hand and prevalence of chronic hunger on the other present a glaring contrast.

The judiciary has played an extremely important role by taking note of three public interest litigations filed in the High Court, which has directed the state to protect and ensure right of life under article 21. In 1997, the High Court further directed the state government to implement a 19-point programme to deal with malnutrition deaths of the children.

In 2004, the High Court took cognisance of media reports and observed the lack of implementation of the government schemes and criticised the state government. However, even a proactive judicial role could not avert malnutrition deaths in Maharashtra. It can be supplemented by Women and Child Development Minister Varsha Gaikwad statement in the legislative assembly on December 2011, wherein she states that in the last four years, that is, 2008-9 to 2011-12, 117493 children have died of malnutrition in the state of Maharashtra.

The State has often attributed malnutrition and resultant deaths to a culture of poverty and social beliefs prevailing in the community. However, issues related to basic health and educational infrastructure, lack of service delivery, inefficient bureaucracy, failure of proper implementation of the schemes, forest policies that affect the livelihood of tribals, access and control over productive agricultural and forest resources, is hardly deliberated.

If the government and opposition together do not demonstrate strong political will to eradicate a social evil like malnutrition, children will continue to die, and the paradox of development vis-à-vis social injustice and lack of equal opportunity will continue to be a burning issue.

Nilratan Shende is Projects Director at Mumbai Smiles NGO and has done his a PhD research paper on ‘Food insecurity, hunger and starvation deaths in Maharshtra: A case study of Melghat’

The views expressed here are the author’s  own and do not necessarily reflect that of any person or organisation.

A mantra in development, and a constant demand in every policy paper, is that there is a need for “capacity development”. The fact that this is still such a prevalent prescription gives an idea of how hard it has been to make progress.

Capacity development is the process by which individuals and organisations develop the ability to set and achieve their own objectives. But beyond that general statement, there is little agreement on what it means. I was hauled over the coals recently for suggesting that capacity was weak in many African countries. It depends what you mean by capacity and which countries you are talking about.

And on top of that no one really knows how it is done. While capacity building used to focus on individuals, now there is more focus on institutions and societies.

But all this fairly well-known analysis is turned on its head by the slogan of a network called the Learning Network for Capacity Development (LenCD), which states simply that “capacity is development”.

I read this to mean that you don’t build capacity as a means to achieving the end of development. Increased capacity is what development is. It is the end itself.

Read the full story.

The state women and child development department said it would immediately issue a government resolution (GR) telling officials in hospitals, police stations and state offices to understand the urgency of domestic violence cases and interpret the Act in its right essence. “We want to ensure the aggrieved women gets immediate relief,” said minister for women and child development, Varsha Gaikwad.

A delegation of women’s rights activists and NGOs met the minister on Thursday to express their concern over the increasing number of cases of domestic violence, especially in urban areas such as Mumbai. The delegation presented a charter of demands to the government, mainly to provide interim and immediate relief to victims of domestic violence. The state, it said, must take urgent steps to create awareness about the Act., which was unveiled in 2005.

Source: Times of India