He quit his job to build shelters for the homeless

Lajwanti Dsouza,Rediff.com
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Shashank Shukla, currently pursuing second year of the Teach for India (TFI) programme has helped set up five homeless adult shelters across Delhi in the last few months and is also running three existing residential homes for children.

Recently, the Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council recommended with much a Rs 4,250 crore programme to provide shelters and other amenities to the homeless in India's cities.

A target of 6,800 permanent shelters has been set with much fanfare by the government for some three lakh homeless, covering 15 percent of the estimated urban Indian population living out in the open.

Deep in the alleys of winter-struck New Delhi, where homeless people gather around little bonfires at night to keep themselves warm, a young MBA graduate who is now in the second year of the Teach for India (TFI) programme has also been working on the same mission but without any glorious announcements.

Shashank Shukla has helped set up five homeless adult shelters across Delhi in the last few months and is also running three existing residential homes for children.

Incidentally, Shashank has also been also assisting the National Advisory Council working group on Urban Poverty.

In the second year of TFI, Shashank arranged a transfer to a school that taught homeless children with little or no education — the first such effort by any TFI fellow.

Himself the father of a three-year-old, Shashank felt that he could sense the agony of other children, especially those without any roof over their heads.

"There are an estimated 20 million children living on the streets of India. I believe that if only our policies catered to them that the government programmes will show results on the ground."

But Shashank had initially planned for something else in life.

"I grew up dreaming that one day I will fight for my country and right after high school, I cleared the National Defence Academy entrance exam, securing an all-India rank of 7 among 1.8 lakh applicants."

However, fate had other designs and just three months before receiving his wings, he had to leave the armed forces because of a service injury. 

"This completely shattered me. I studied in my hospital bed and secured admission to TA Pai Management Institute (TAPMI), Manipal. Post MBA, like all my batch mates, I secured a corporate job and grew rapidly in my career. His job at that time was based in the US and fetched him nearly $100,000 as basic salary with additional sales incentives."

But something seemed amiss to him in the US and Shashank felt a desire to come back home and do something for children here.

During his MBA days, Shashank had visited his native state Uttar Pradesh and that changed his life altogether. His father-in-law proposed that he would donate his ancestral land to build a graduate college in a backward district of Uttar Pradesh where no institution of higher learning existed.

So Shashank and his wife got the college built and called it Gurukul. The school has some 500 plus students, mainly poor.

This 'education' kick refused to leave him and Shashank left the US to come back to India and do something for the homeless and uneducated. On his return, he enrolled into the TFI programme.

"Here, I learned a lot about teaching as a leadership framework. I also got the opportunity to work with leaders like Anu Aaga who is a member of the National Advisory Council -- the Sonia Gandhi-led advisory body to the government -- on issues regarding 'Right to Education' and other legislations like Unique Identification, Right to Food and Communal Harmony bill."

"This is where I realised the value of involving practitioners who have worked at the grassroots level in framing policies at the national level," Shashank told.

The young man's vision for his post-TFI fellowship work became further refined during an internship in the summer of 2011, where he interned with the Supreme Court commissioner's office (Harsh Mander) on issues of urban homelessness, with a focus on homeless children and ways to include them under the 'Right to Education' act.

"This exercise made me aware of the 'last child', who in my mind is a destitute, orphan child and is the most needy, yet has been pushed to being the last in line for entitlements and rights as he has no strength, no voice and no representation," Shashank explains.

As part of his internship study, Shashank had to prepare a report on the situation of the homeless.

Assisted by advocacy from people like Mander, the report prompted the Supreme Court to pass orders to all state governments to plan for the homeless in the 12th five year plan and the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and recognise residential homes for the homeless children as residential schools for the benefit of the neediest children.

This winter, Shashank became closely involved with shelters for the homeless. His five shelters include two adult women shelters, two adult men shelters and one shelter for drug addicts, a first of its kind in Delhi.

Though the homes are run by Harsh Mander's organisation Aman Biradari, Shashank is in-charge of the operations. At the moment, Shashank and his group are trying to link these shelters to a community kitchen model. He is also working on setting up models for the destitute to raise themselves out of homelessness by earning a livelihood.

Shashank wants to continue on the same path even after his TFI fellowship ends.

He wants to make sure that by 2020 every child and the homeless in India actually has a home to go to when the day is done and a pillow to rest their head on.

Photographs: Uttam Ghosh,Seema Pant

She helps dyslexic children discover joys of writing

 Rediff.com

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After weaving stories for kids in beautiful books, dyslexic author Dheera Kitchlu is now helping children like her bring out their writing talents into the open.

Through her initiative 'Anyone can write', Dheera Kitchlu who has penned a total of eight books says writing for children is very unique and kids should be encouraged to write from a young age.

"Being a dyslexic, I never wrote due to fear. Children have a lot of talent but they feel inhibited and do not write. They have wonderful stories to tell. I want to encourage them to write," says Kitchlu, whose first book was published in 1992.

In collaboration with the self-publishing portal Serene Woods, the free-of-cost initiative allows children to get help from Kitchlu to create original, individual work, through one-on-one interactions.

Children send their stories to Kitchlu through post and email, who reads and guides the writers to better their writing. The initiative aims to make children confident of their writing at an early age.

"I am compiling the stories into a book. There are around 30 stories and the book would be out by mid next year," says Kitchlu.

Describing herself as a late bloomer, the author says she came to know very late about her dyslexia. "I was always a bad student. I could not spell and still have difficulty in reading. While in my 30s, I came to know that I was marginally dyslexic," she says.

Her reading disability prompted her to write for children and make learning fun for them. She began writing when her children left home and her books are autobiographical.

One of her novels Maya is about a dyslexic child and his feelings. Kitchlu has also written a booklet for the Indian Association for Promotion of Adoption and Child Welfare to help parents coming to adopt a child. The booklet is distributed free to all parents who come to adopt children at centres in Mumbai.

"The booklet reflects the belief that all children are a special gift. It strives to help the adopted child grow with a conviction that she is loved, wanted and cherished," she says.

Kitchlu has also written From Darkness to Light for The National Association for the Blind, which is a compilation of uncommon lives of 25 blind women achievers who have received the Neelam Kanga award for excellence in various fields of work.

"I did not know much about the psyche of the blind. During the writing of this book, these indefatigable ladies became my friends and were instrumental in allowing me to appreciate more deeply the human experience," she says.

The author contributes part of her proceeds from her from writing to an orphanage in Bandra. She is happy that children literature is picking up gradually in India.
"Though a lot of children's books are still sourced from abroad, I am happy that many Indian writers are writing for them. We need children books in Indian context," says Kitchlu.

Along with cinema, literature too plays an important role in shaping children's future and making society aware of their problems and needs, she points out.

Can Meena Build An Indian Google?

Tech Crunch by Vivek Wadhwa on Jun 26, 2010

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Meena wants to become a computer engineer. She believes that if she works hard enough, she can build her own “big business”—maybe a Google. So she is determined to complete her schooling and earn an engineering degree. Young girls like Meena, just 16 years old but with the ambition and confidence to enter the tech world, are a rare commodity even in Silicon Valley; but Meena lives in a slum in New Delhi. Her father works as a day laborer. He used to spend half his income on alcohol, and would come home drunk every night and make so much noise that Meena could not do her homework. He considered Meena a liability, saw no value in her education, and had nothing to be optimistic about.

Sana Azmi too lives in a Delhi slum. She is determined to become a lawyer. Sana has long had this ambition, but her unemployed father had made the decision to withdraw her from school this year, when she turns 16. His plan was to get her married as soon as possible, and he believed that if Sana received too much education, it would be difficult to find a suitable groom in their socioeconomic community. Moreover, they simply couldn’t afford to educate her. Sana begged her Dad to find a way; she told him that without higher education she would be like an “empty room”.

Meena’s father has now stopped drinking and is working long hours to save money for her education. He considers Meena to be the pride of the family, and is hopeful that she will lift the family out of poverty. And Sana’s parents are no longer on the lookout for potential grooms for their daughter. Instead, they are supporting and encouraging her efforts to complete high school and continue on to university.

How did these transformations happen? Through a non-profit group called Roshni Academy, which identifies, trains, and mentors brilliant girls from socioeconomically underprivileged communities. Founded by Saima Hasan when she was a junior at Stanford in 2007, and funded by Silicon Valley business leaders and philanthropists, Roshni has already transformed the lives of more than 500 underprivileged girls, in seven districts of Delhi.

The Roshni formula is simple: empower smart girls with self confidence, critical thinking skills, basic social skills, and life skills—and make them realize that they can succeed by working hard and taking risks. Roshni girls, all of whom live below the poverty line yet maintain top academic standing, undergo intensive education through three training modules over a six-month period. The curriculum covers 25 subjects, ranging from public speaking to conflict management to hygiene. Students are also taught computer and internet basics. At the end of each training season, 60 top-performing students are granted scholarships by the Nurul Hasan Foundation to pursue their secondary and higher education.

I was blown away by the energy and enthusiasm of the Roshni students I met on my recent trip to New Delhi. They were as confident as the students I teach at Duke and Berkeley. They bombarded me with great questions—they had a deep hunger to learn. And they were amazingly optimistic. Like the techies I know, they believed they could change the world. What surprised me the most was that that each of them claimed to have learned English through the Roshni program. This didn’t make sense given the short duration of the course. It turns out that even though they had studied English in school, these girls had never had the opportunity or confidence to speak it. Watch the video below of 15-year-old Roshni student Bazla Ambareen (and the other videos) to understand what I mean.

Conditions for the poor in India are dire, and people live at the extremes; but, sadly, things aren’t always that much better in some parts of the U.S. and in other parts of the world. You don’t have to go as far as Harlem, NY, or Durham, NC, to see poverty and disfranchised youth. In Silicon Valley, you can just visit schools in East Palo Alto or Oakland. In fact, Saima Hasan says that she got the idea for developing the Roshni program while tutoring students in East Palo Alto. That’s where she hopes to pilot, next year, an American version of her program.

My conclusion: if Roshni girls can rise above poverty, alcoholism, gender bias, domestic violence, marriage pressures, religious oppression, and a wide range of complex social and economic obstacles through pure hard work and determination, so can underprivileged communities in the U.S. There is nothing to stop us from lifting our minorities out of poverty and fixing the societal problems such as those that I’ve previously written about—American girls being left out of the tech world.

Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. You can follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa and find his research atwww.wadhwa.com.

We wanted to make change affordable

Rediff Get Ahead

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Now that Ujjaini's trust was won, the next important step for SIFE HRC volunteers was to collect funds to buy solar lamps to light up the village and seek a vendor who would provide them with these lamps at a reasonable cost.

They accidentally chanced upon a social entrepreneur, one Mr Kumar -- who is quite secretive about his identity and has requested these students not to reveal more about him -- who agreed to sell them at a nominal cost of Rs 3,650 per unit that would include one LED-powered lantern, one tubelight, one battery encased in a protective cover, two solar panels and wiring.

"To light up entire Ujjaini comprising 111 households at the cost of Rs 3,650 per unit we needed Rs 4,05,000, a rather difficult task for us college students," says Jyotirmoy.

They had never engaged in this kind of money-raising exercise, but it had to be done. Going to corporates would not have been of much help because these students only had a noble idea with no history, no record, nothing that could prove their sincerity and ability to execute a project of such enormity to corporate bigwigs.

"Why would anybody give us that kind of money?" they would often think aloud at their meetings to brainstorm over ways to raise money.

As they say, adversity is the father of all inventions, so these college kids, facing a financial crunch, started thinking about their strengths. After a few days they got their Eureka moment. They were 6,000 students in all and if each one of them contributed even Rs 10, they thought, they would have made a small beginning.

"At the very next moment we came up with a slogan: Rs 10 for light," says Abhinav.

"We could have easily gone to rich bakras in our college and they would have donated us the money we wanted. But we wanted to make change affordable," says Jyotirmoy, elaborating on the fact that they wanted their entire college to partake in this noble affair without burdening any one student.

They had heard a lot of young people in their college talking about bringing in change so they thought their idea could give the youth in their college a chance to become part of that transformation.

The idea was to make all feel proud about their little contributions. "Let's not make even a peon feel that just because s/he is a peon s/he cannot help bring about real, meaningful change in our society," says Afsheen.

"If anybody can afford to save Rs 10 every day of the year s/he could easily muster the Rs 3,650 needed to buy one unit of the solar lamp," says Prachi.

All the students from junior as well as degree colleges came together and unanimously decided to work on it. They wanted to experience the thrill and joy of getting something beyond a college award or a passing certificate.

They wanted to prove a point to all those (read: government, corporates) who always talked about improving the lives of the backward and the disadvantaged, who have the money to bring about that change but have not brought about the change they could.

"We wanted to prove a point that if students of one college can collect the money and light up a village, what kind of tremendous change can corporates and governments bring about given the resources they have," says Afsheen.

Image: Clockwise from top: SIFE HRC volunteers installing solar lamps and tubelights inside a tribal's home; Volunteers with Rs for light placards.

Today tribals know us as the light people

Rediff : Get Ahead

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SIFE HRC, established in 2008, was initially concentrating more on urban projects. But soon the volunteers felt the need to glance at exploring sustainable business models for rural development as "a majority of Indians still live in its villages".

"So when we got a list of dark villages from TERI we randomly picked up one village that was populated and without any kind of guidance took a car and wandered into the forests to find Ujjaini," says Abhinav, Jyotirmoy's classmate.

After coming back from Ujjaini they decided to work on a five-point transformation model that was scalable and could be applied to any dark village in rural India.

This five-point plan would look at a holistic solution to transform rural lives and provide for:

• Solar electrification
• Health and sanitation
• Education
• Economic upliftment and
• Social development

"Phase I of Project Chirag is to electrify dark villages using solar lighting because achieving the remainder of the four points in the transformation model depend on lighting up villages first," says Prachi, a third-year commerce student.

During their trip to Ujjaini the students found that the tribals spent a lot of the day, their productive period, going into the forests to collect firewood to light up their homes or cook food.

"So we thought introducing solar lighting would help them use their time productively," explains Prachi.

Why government is important

While their motive was noble, it wasn't going to be an easy task. They knew that the key to Project Chirag's success lay in winning the tribals' trust. After all, they were the biggest stakeholders in the entire exercise and making them understand the benefits of Project Chirag was very crucial for its implementation and further spread.

Hence they needed somebody who would introduce the SIFE HRC volunteers to the tribals and act as a facilitator. With the help of their college principal they managed to get an appointment with Jayant Patil, Maharashtra's rural development minister who, after listening to their five-point transformation model, was mighty impressed and helped them touch base with deputy COO of Thane zilla parishad, Deepak Waigankar.

"When we went to Ujjaini with him we understood how important he was, for the villagers gave us a grand welcome," says Pawan, a second-year commerce student, talking about how they managed to break the ice with Ujjaini's inhabitants. That meeting, which also included Ujjaini's gram sevak and block development officer, helped these students establish trust among the tribals.

"Obviously, they would feel more comfortable with the involvement of a body like the zilla parishad (a local self-government organisation) rather than dealing directly with a bunch of enthusiastic students who were total strangers to them," adds Prachi.

No matter how good their ideas were, they could not execute them without the help of the existing government machinery. Only after that were the people receptive of their ideas and plans.

"Today they know us by our faces and call us the 'light people'," says Prachi, a third-year commerce student, with a big smile.

Image: Clockwise from top left: SIFE HRC volunteers training village women in using soil to make artefacts; Training to make garlands; Installing solar panels; SIFE, HRC volunteers at Ujjaini; Villagers register for light by paying Rs 500.

These college kids want to light up 'dark India'

Rediff : Get Ahead
Prasanna D Zore

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Mohan Bhargava, the reel-life NASA scientist portrayed by Shah Rukh Khan in Swades who lights up his native village using hydro power can take a walk. A bunch of young college students -- no scientists, these -- have done the same in real life, in a simple, innovative way through their passion, innovation and ingenuity.

The striking part, though, is the speed with which they have executed their idea. They conceptualised it on January 11, 2010, and by March 12 had accomplished their task of lighting up 82 out of a total of 111 homes in a tribal village in Thane district of Maharashtra.

What's praiseworthy is that in less than 100 days a group of 250 college students managed to win the faith of the tribals -- without which Project Chirag (more about it later) would have been a "super flop" -- raised a "humongous amount of money" (their own words), selected a vendor who gave them the technology to produce quality solar lamps, trained a disadvantaged section to assemble the lamps, trained their own volunteers to impart training to the assemblers, transported and installed solar lamps in this village and sold these lamps that costs them Rs 3,650 a piece for just Rs 500 to make Project Chirag a reality.

In doing so, they have created a value chain of several disadvantaged communities -- both rural and urban -- that has the true potential to transform the country's landscape.

According to some estimates, approximately 400 million people in India do not have access to electricity and it is this gap these students aim to bridge.

With guidance and encouragement from their college professor Pratibha Pai and principal Indu Shahani (who also happens to be Mumbai's sheriff), more than two score students of HR College of Commerce & Economics lit up Ujjaini, a tribal 'dark village' deep in the forest, spread across a radius of two km and made up of 111 households, barely 110 km from India's financial capital Mumbai in Wada tehsil in Thane district.

Rediff.com met five of these activists -- Jyotirmoy Chatterji, Prachi Bali, Abhinav Mehra, Afsheen Irani and Pawan Bhatia (all under 23 years of age) -- in their college canteen to discuss Project Chirag started by the Students In Free Enterprise, HR College.

Project Chirag

"A village that does not have any source of electricity or does not have even one electrified household. is a 'dark village'," explains Jyotirmoy, a third year commerce student and president of SIFE, HRC.

"Project Chirag is about lighting up rural life using clean and sustainable solar energy," he says.

And these volunteers chose Ujjaini out of a list of 30 dark villages in Thane district that the Tata Energy Research Institute provided them with "because the tribal folks here have never seen light in their entire life".

The solar lamp unit is a portable LED (light emitting diode) device that comprises a solar lantern, a battery inside protective casing, a tubelight and two solar panels that capture sunlight and convert it into light energy.

"All one has to do is put two panels on the rooftops of these tribal houses where one can get maximum sunlight, connect the wires coming out of these panels into a battery which in turn energises the tubelight and lantern and they are ready to go," says Afsheen, a second-year student at HRC who has trained many tribals in Ujjaini to work on these lamps.

Image: Clockwise from top: A grandmother with impaired vision excited that her grandson can finally experience light; A happy Ujjain family; Tribal children reading a book under solar lamps.

Photographs: Project Chirag

Deepak Saha gave up IAS to develop villages

Prabhakar Kumar / CNN-IBN

Published on Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 16:59, Updated on Sun, Feb 22, 2009 at 01:46 in India section

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Jai Prabha Foundation

Banka District (Bihar): In CNN-IBN's Special Series Real Heroes, meet Deepak Saha, who could have been an IAS officer but shunned the life of comfort to transform 40 villages in his home state Bihar. Read more...

The semi-plateau terrain at the Bihar-Jharkhand border was a virgin experiment bowl for Deepak Saha, where not even a blade of grass grew. Today, this region has everything - right from well irrigated green lush fields, mango gardens, schools for kids, safe drinking water for all, vocational training centers for women folks-churning out new breed of women entrepreneurs, successful models of women's self help groups and health centers in every village.

Today, in this entire region, not a single soul lives below the poverty line and sex ratio has been completely reversed in favour of girl children.

"I started this social entrepreneurship. It was primarily because of the economic comfort my family background provided me. I really didn't have to think only about bread and butter and it gave me liberty and scope to do what I enjoyed doing the most. I wanted to be a social entrepreneur."

It all started in 1990, when Deepak cracked the civil service exams. But instead of taking up a Government job, he chose to return back to Bhagalpur to join Jaiprabha, the NGO being run by his mother. After 18 years of long journey, today he looks back with contentment.

"The motto that our organisation has is towards self reliance. So we don't want the population to be dependent on what we are doing for them, but they should become self-reliant so that they are able to fend for themselves, so that once we are redundant, once we phase out of this area, they should be able to look after all this. People's participation is important," he says.

A usual day in Deepak's life starts early morning with newspapers and breakfast with the family members and soon after, he is on move to what he calls his experiment bowl. Nothing refreshes him more than joining children in their playground and playing Santa Claus to them.

Today, Deepak runs 13 such pre-schools, where dance and songs are the medium of teaching. After teaching at the school, he joins the mothers of the children for the weekly Self Help Group meetings. It's this initiative, which has had maximum impact on the lives and earnings of families. For the first time, females of this area can walk out of their houses and start their own ventures from the petty loans they take from their Self Help Groups. In this way, they are able to contribute to family income. Today, they walk tall and proud.

"It was almost seen as a economic enterprise. We didn't just want it to be some women gathering together and starting some small manufacturing unit or a small business enterprise. We started social engineering through these groups, to empower them. They started dressing better, had their own money and they had their own investments. They could take loans. We linked them up," explains Deepak.

Irrigation had been another stress area for this nearly barren plateau region. The answers came in the form of deep bore wells, de-silting of natural water bodies using satellite imageries and building check dam and using lift irrigation for farming.

"Just because of water problems whenever we used to go to the field and exert pressure on people to send the children to school, they would refuse to. They used the children as working hands because they did not have the means to sustain themselves. I realised the reason they were not able to sustain themselves was because the irrigation was very weak and primitive. It was absolutely monsoon dependent. They needed means of irrigation especially since this entire area is a plateau with a reverse from both sides. So we lifted the water high in this low lying area with the help of a check dam. It has been replicated in 10 villages and all their fields have become fertile. They are getting free crops, they are doing multi-cropping and the land is getting fertile," says Deepak.

Eighteen years of experimentation and consistent efforts has yielded desired results in this region.

• Over 131 deep borewells and hand-pumps introduced by Jaiprabha provide safe drinking water to 100 per cent of the population of the region.

• There has been not a single maternity death in the past three years.

• Education in these villages is almost 100 per cent.

• The Jaiprabha Vikas Kendra caters to the personality development of people by providing vocational training in arts, crafts, music, tailoring and other related activities.

Smiles on the faces of the children and the women cycling fearlessly in this Naxal infested area are just few reflections of how one intervention has made a world of difference for people of this region.