Resilience and perseverance - the two virtues almost always attributed to the...
Education For Change
Imagine yourself as a child living in a small mud house in a green valley,...
Totes Amaze: How This NGO In Kutch Is Fighting Plastic With Plastic
Nine billion tons - that's the amount of plastic we have created since the...
Dialogue And Democracy: Understanding Theatre Of The Oppressed
Paulo Friere was a renowned Brazilian educator and philosopher. As a leading...
What Being Restricted Taught Me About Empowerment
As I work with Shram Sarathi in Gogunda block of Udaipur, Rajasthan, if I have...
Education And Internet
While assisting a class 10 child studying in an IB School, I learned that his...
Is Environment A Labour Issue?
Early last month, I watched Seaspiracy, Kip Anderson's second project to shed...
Failing And Moving From Making Agriculture Work For Rural Youth
Born and brought up in Delhi, I had a fascination to get an exposure to the...
Radio Has a Special Place in the Heart of Rural India
“It has been 11 years but I still remember the day when my 12th grade results were to come. I was eagerly waiting since morning. Those days, we didn't have internet. Radio was the only medium. My father was a keen radio listener and I recall how he sat throughout the...
Why Doctors Don’t Want To Work In Rural Areas
When I was doing my medical house surgeon-ship in Mangalore a few years ago, Karnataka government was planning to implement compulsory rural service for house surgeons in the state. This news was not taken in a positive light by the doctors which eventually led to...
We Are In A Crisis We Don’t Acknowledge
I was sitting on an uber comfortable Barcalounger with gigantic headphone over my ears. An ethereal voice was asking me to close my eyes, relax, think of something that makes me happy and form a picture of said happiness in my mind. Next thing I knew, I was being...
My Learning From A Genius : Stephen Hawking
On 14th March 2018 when we woke up, the world collectively experienced a huge loss. We read about the death of Stephen Hawking, the globally renowned theoretical physicist and cosmologist known for his work on general relativity and quantum gravity, in the context of...
Underlying Causes Of The TB Epidemic In India
In the recent End TB Summit held in New Delhi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched a campaign to eradicate tuberculosis (TB) from India by 2025, five years ahead of its globally set-deadline. Now, one might think that given 7 years we have in hand and support from...
Relevance of Affordable Private Schools for Education
In last few months, I have been interacting a lot with my community that surrounds Swarachna school in Sitapur, Uttar Pradesh. Of varied things I got to know about them, a common link in all villages is that nobody wants to send their children to a government school....
Hallucinations To Reality: Child Sexual Abuse And Parenting
There are only a few people to whom I'm really close. One of them is a classmate I know since 6 years. We met in college and graduated together. Socially, he is extremely awkward and an introvert who is fascinated by trains. I have never met him after college. In...
How Would It Be To Think Without Words!
Most of my last month was spent conducting Focus Group Discussions (FGDs) with students of various skill development training programs. These are short term programs, from 4-6 months, focusing on skills such as Computer Literacy, Workplace Readiness and Basic English...
Lessons From a Temporary Illness : Looking Through a Glass
The last quarter of 2017 has been quite weird. I’ve been privy to something remarkably out of my comfort zone, and in turn, have put many people out of theirs. But, that's a debate for the more refined minds. India Fellow is like that freaky mirror in Lewis Carrol’s...
What Is Demographic Dividend And How It’s Related To Education
By 2020, India is set to become the world’s youngest country with 64% of its population in the working age group.[1] This demographic advantage can be translated into more production of goods and increased services, thus improving the overall GDP growth rate, a...
Why Farmers Are Growing Cotton When Water Is Scarce
“I wish they'd had electric guitars in cotton fields back in the good old days. A whole lot of things would've been straightened out.” -Jimi Hendrix, 1970 YES, if the ‘whole lot of things’ were farmers wanting to form a band but a NO if it were racial conflicts and...
When Gender and Disability Discriminate Together
“What do you see yourself doing in 10 years from now?” This is one of the questions that I have asked repeatedly over the last two months, from disabled people I work with. I wonder if I have an answer to it but that's a story for another day. Each time, I ask this...
The Double Burden Of ‘Malnutrition’ And ‘Mall-nutrition’
Baiganwadi is one of the oldest and largest waste dumping ground in Mumbai, located in Govandi (East). The slum here is densely populated as several people share a small same room (10ft. x 15ft.). The population exceeds 2lakh and Muslim community holds the majority....
Victim Blaming – A Popular Culture In The Nation
“Bachchi ki samajhdaari ko bhi main thoda sa kehna chahti hun…saari bachiyon ko...ki already jab koi teen aadmi baithe hue hain uske andar…to aapko usme baithna nahi chahiye tha…I am saying this to protect the girls”, Kher was quoted as saying at the press conference....