India:
Back to School
By Aparna Pallavi

Arambh, a Bhopal-based NGO, has taken up the challenge of getting the city's slum children to return to school. Scores of children attend Arambh's centres, based in six shanty settlements, to study at timings that best suit them, often after a hard day's work. Arambh activists have also successfully managed to bridge the divide between the working-class parents and schoolteachers. These social workers sensitise school authorities on the special needs of their wards; and counsel employers against mistreating or overworking their young workers.

* "Parents would complain that their children wouldn't study. Now, the same parents tell us that their children study even when there is a power failure - by candlelight."

INDIA:
Teenage Hope Grows Wings
By Anuja Agrawal

For most poor girls in rural India, studying up to class five is a distant dream. But the residential Mahila Shikshan Kendras (MSK) - run under the aegis of the Mahila Samakhya Programme in Uttar Pradesh - are turning this dream into a reality by taking them in for nine months and teaching them about women's rights, gender equality, health and hygiene, along with regular school work. The MSKs enable the eager students to appear for their class five examinations at the end of the term. At present, 35 girls, aged between 12 and 19 years, study at the Saharanpur MSK and almost 90 per cent belong to very poor Dalit families. The wholesome education has initiated a social change in villages with young women declining to marry early and keen to further their education to become career women.

* 'After passing out of class five from the Kendra, Sharmila has continued her schooling. Though she still does all the household work, she wishes to continue studying to become a schoolteacher.'

India:
Full Marks For Changing Lives
By Tarannum

Everyday, the lives of hundreds of marginalised adolescent girls from the scheduled castes, scheduled tribes and other backward castes of the country's most populous state of Uttar Pradesh change for the better. The change has been brought about by the advent of quality education, courtesy the Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalayas (KGBVs), residential schools set up by the Ministry of Human Resource Development. Young women who could barely read or write until a few years back, now speak up with confidence, dabble in creative writing and use the computer, as a result of joining a KGBV. The schools which promise to make the young women worthy of themselves and their community, promise to soon impart specialised training in disaster management, alongside the regular course and personal grooming activities.

* "She had never tasted 'dal' (lentil)... At her house, they just ate once a day and at times survived on water. When she got three meals a day at the KGVB, she was convinced she would fall sick if she ate 'too much'."

India:
In Female Foeticide Country, A School That Values Girls
By Nirupama Dutt

It's a school with a difference. Offering affordable education to young women, who would otherwise have simply tended to household chores until their marriage, this school in a border district of Punjab, where female foeticide is rampant, encourages women's empowerment through unique self-sustaining measures that see senior school students teach the younger classes and even manage the school mess.

* "The menu is decided by the girls themselves with common consensus. We use most of the vegetables and grain grown on the eight-acre school farm."

Do your child's textbooks promote peace and reconciliation? Perhaps it is time to monitor not just your child's homework but the very textbook he or she may have been prescribed. For several school textbooks expose young minds to the symbolism of revenge and hatred and even reinforce stereotypes of masculinity and identity. The influence and outreach of textbooks are enormous - some state textbook boards have a print order of 0.35 million - even as some of the content may exhort patriotism, visualised as marching in the army, killing 'enemies' and stepping on to the glorious path of martyrdom.

* 'As a counter-point to the kind of ideal masculinity, ideal womanhood is depicted as homely, devoted to the patriarchal family...'

India:
Eco Solution: Embankment School To Flood-proof Education
By Anjali Singh

Extreme weather has had a profound impact on not just the physical environment, but the social environment as well. If you take a short stroll through Rewali Adampur, an embankment in Kaiserganj Baraich - one of Uttar Pradesh's most flood prone districts - during the flood season, you will get an idea of the predicament people face year after year because of the vagaries of the weather. For four months in a year, the children here lose out on schooling, either because their classrooms are under water, or because their school premises are being used to house flood-hit communities. This unfortunate scenario may soon be a thing of the past, thanks to an innovative initiative: Running makeshift camp schools on embankments during the flood season.

* "I was not as distraught as I normally am when the floods came, because at least my children did not miss their classes."

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