write an article on inspiring slum children through education.
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Explanation:
Inspiring slum children through education: a story from Delhi
Geeta Dharmarajan, Executive Director, Katha, India
In a personal account of the 22 years since she set up Katha (which means ‘story’ in most Indian languages), Geeta Dharmarajan reflects on how education services can inspire children and women from urban slum environments to become active in improving their communities. The article explains how Katha’s model of classroom education combined with community-focused projects teaches children to think for themselves and contribute to strengthening their society, and looks at how Katha’s work with government to take their ideas to scale could provide a model for India’s rapidly-urbanising society.
In April 2010 we brought together leading thinkers from government, academia and the nonprofit world at a workshop to discuss ‘The Child and the Megacity’ – a look at the impact of slum environments in Delhi on the lives and education of children. The issue will become more and more important. From 18 million today, the population of Delhi is predicted to rise to between 21 million and 26 million by 2030. Across India, by 2030 an estimated 590 million people – nearly twice the current population of the USA – will be living in cities.
According to a report by McKinsey1, approximately 170 million of 2030’s urban Indians will be tomorrow’s pre-/primary schoolers – and yet we are not investing nearly enough in those children today. Even the Right to Education Act2 that India has finally enacted gives only a sideward glance at early learners. Things are changing, though, and we hope that our engagements in Delhi today can show the way for other metropolisses in India.
First we need to tell the story of how our organisation evolved from its original aims to our present plans. Katha is an organisation based around the idea of ‘story’, we started in 1988 with the mission to enhance the joy of reading, through a health and environment magazine for first generation school-goers. But soon we realised we were putting the cart before the horse. Didn’t children and women first have to know how to read before they could walk the road out of poverty to self-reliance?
Our first creche and school for slum children
On September 8, 1989, by fortunate chance also World Literacy Day, Katha was registered as a nonprofit striving to make a difference in the literacy to literature continuum. I still remember my first visit to Govindpuri, one of the largest slum clusters in Delhi. Govindpuri already had thousands of families, about 50% Hindu, 50% Muslim. Families had many children; most of them didn’t go to school. When I asked, mothers said, “Yes, we want our children to go to school, but they have to support the family”.
At that time, many of our mothers were bravely managing their families, single-handedly, with 7-14 year olds helping out. I saw girls with little siblings tucked into their hips, often almost as big as they themselves. Four year olds were working – though to be fair, their mothers thought they were sending their toddlers to ‘schools’ that provided lunch.
The main culprit? Poverty. When they migrated to Delhi for work, these families settled in the most neglected spaces – degraded land infested with mosquitoes and flies with no drainage or water, electricity or garbage disposal. They could not afford anywhere else. This, for them, was one way of being invisible, of not being evicted.
So started the Khazana Experiment, our ‘deschool’ that would also strive to make the environments of children living in urban slums a little better, with a little less violence, a little more hygiene.