Shall we form our own Children’s Union ?

Sam and Simmi go to a government school in grade 4th in a city in India. They have been going to this school since last 4 yrs and they say they are quite regular. Once they were picked by a ‘kind hearted’ NGO to participate in an essay writing competition for a CSR activity of a big ‘kind hearted’ corporate. The topic was, ‘my school’ !

Sam took the permission to write in the vernacular language and started….My school’s name is Government Primary School (GPS), in Good-Good-Nagar. It had 300 children 2 years back, 130 children last year and now we are a small elite group of 43 children in the whole school across 5 grades. Head master of my school is a very nice person but I think he has some family problems as he comes to school only once a week. My favorite teacher is Sarita, a class 5th girl. My class teacher madam appoints her most of the times to take care of our class as she is busy most of the time in staff-room in talking to other teachers and motivating them. Cooking of mid day meals for us also keeps her busy. I always get curious that why she takes such a special interest in mid day meals ? She might be interested in cooking for us. My home is not very far from the school. I go there around 5-6 times a day during the school hours to visit the toilet and drink water as my teachers alone cannot manage the water arrangement and toilet cleaning at school.

Simmi, daughter of a small time basti leader had a different take….She pretended that her hand is paining and asked the NGO volunteer to write as she narrates her essay …She started like this ….My school’s name is Government Primary School (GPS), No-One-Cares Nagar. Strength of the school is decreasing every year as most of the children have started going to the road side ‘Ravi Convent School’ paying Rs 300 per month. My Head master Mr. Ravi owns that school and that’s why he rarely comes to our school. Our teachers keep on gossiping in the staff room and send 5th class children to control us. Some teachers manage the whole mid day meal and my father told me that they get money for 100 children as per the register, bud hardly 50 children come daily to school. There is no water facility in the schools and being a girl I feel so ashamed to go to toilet in open. And the truth is that after being in school for 4 years many of us including me can’t even read and write properly even in our mother tongue. My father gets paid and goes for many rallies, dharnas and bandhs BUT he never does a rally for me, for us, that we are not learning, that our teachers are not taking care of us, that we don’t get proper food in the school, that we don’t have water and toilets in the school. Can you all “kind hearted’ people, please pay my dad, so that he and his friends can do some dharna to save us.

Or may be all 43 of us can make a children’s union and do the dharna ourselves!

Reflections on India

After reading Sean Paul Kelley's "reflections on India" @ http://www.seanpaulkelley.com/?p=620 I had to sit down and collect my thoughts...Thanks Sean to make me go back to the blog board after a log gap.....

Sean started with "the four most preventing India from becoming a developing nation"....When France and many others are backing India for UN SC seat.....UK's new government wants to please India for its looming economy and every American company dreams to open a office in India, to be called truly global...Sean must have faced some real tough days in India to pen this article and deny the facts....

Though I don't deny most of the observations made by Sean, but this writing is coming across more of his personal frustration of digesting the fact that ………How come a country without following the conventional western path of development of cleanliness, paranoidal hygiene, sophisticated infrastructure, discipline and the rest of it……..Is able to post 9% growth year on year, able to make billion dollar international acquisitions, able to make President Bush run around the whole globe as India’s brand ambassador for the nuclear deal, able to be the software and the back office hub for the whole of the word, including many companies in Texas, Sean’s home state….

For long, the western idea of efficiency, of order, of precision has been mouthed out loud. I agree we have garbage lying around in our cities. But that's not all that describes a society. We are helpful, tolerant, childish, innocent, religious, historical, festive, traditional, hierarchical... long list.So much more than a 40%-of-their-population-earns-less-than-a-dollar society.

Sean says…..”It take triplicates to register into a hotel. To get a SIM card for one’s phone is like wading into a jungle of red-tape and photocopies…….. Getting train tickets is a terrible ordeal, first you have to find the train number…….” I really want to know the names of the hotels where Sean faced that…..If Sean found it difficult to get a SIM card in India……then He should never try the same in Switzerland….As getting a pre-paid SIM card in Switzerland (among the top 10 most developed countries as per HDI) takes more documents then a visa application….let alone dreaming for a post-paid connection….To book a train ticket, Sean should have used the internet…..I will help you in all these mundane things next time Sean ! After living in a country where a few motor companies have fooled and destroyed the whole public transport system…I can imagine that, It must be difficult for Sean…..

But having said all of that….I accept all the other observations with the great ‘Indian’ humility…..Just give us a few more years….We are only 63 years old as a independent nation…..Americans took very many years to establish the basic civil rights for its citizens, even being a free nation from more than 200+ years….Europe has seen the worst plagues in the world in the past owing to unhygienic conditions……Even today America is the worst polluter and highest in per capita emissions……Income disparity is worse in America than India (Based on GINI coefficient)…

Comments and reflections like these are surely useful for us to tighten the grip further…..I will just request author’s like Sean to do a more intelligent comparison while writing their observation…..India, which is 14 times more populated than Ethiopia, with India’s wide cultural and linguist differences may not learn much with other references…..Those comparisons will only have editorial value for the sake of a eye catching headline....

Religion and Development : Hungry for Researchers....

In spite of the fact that more than 90% of the people in the world follow some or the other religious belief system, the academicians and researchers in the development field are still acting innocent towards the strong co-relation between religion, faith and international development. Human beings wear a plural personality. They wear the identity of their countries, castes, languages, gender, age etc. Development researchers and policy makers, try hard to find the common factors among communities and countries to unite them but often fail to do so because of this vast plurality. Belief in one or the other religion or faith is the only common factor running across the global population, which researchers fail to acknowledge.

Development studies has given birth to many wonderful development approaches in the last 60 years of its inception. Human beings are the center of all the development approaches. For any development approach to succeed in policy and practice, we need honest and selfless contribution from many human beings. Unfortunately no development approach came out with the mechanism to produce good, honest and dedicated human beings. Religion and faith have the answers to this, which development researchers are rarely daring to explore.

‘Display’ of ‘morality’ lies at the core of the current international development practice. North, after exploiting south for many years wants to act ‘moral’ in the form of a donor. Forced global governance equations keep this relationship going. Religion has the power and wisdom to convert this forced morality into the basic human nature but unfortunately development researchers are still contented with their triplet of economics, politics and anthropology. For example, there is very little, if any discussion in the mainstream development debate on the interrelation between religion and development. Though a few noble initiatives like ‘Religion and Development’ (RaD) research program in University of Birmingham are trying hard to carve a space in the mainstream development research arena, but largely this arena is still hungry for researchers...