Slum Development and Education

While making my docu feature on Slum Development, I read many articles on Slum Development. But one of them on which I decided to write a blog post was on sifynews.in. 

It was about an NGO Asha . It is a community health and development society that works with over 400,000 people in nearly 50 slum colonies of Delhi.  

Only 30 percent of Delhi's slum children make it to school beyond the age of 14. But defying the statistics and the odds, a clutch of bright-eyed youngsters is now studying humanities and even engineering in well known colleges - with a little help from this NGO.

 Eighteen-year-old Babita who joined Delhi University as a political science student. She  thought that she would be married off as her  mother could not afford her higher education. 

There were times when her two brothers and she did not have anything to eat and slept empty stomach She did not have a penny.. But "Asha" came to her rescue by paying her college fees.

Mahesh, 19,got 83 percent in Class 10, there was a mixed feeling of wanting to earn and study too. He took an education loan of around Rs.1.5 lakh and the NGO helped him in all the formalities , besides guiding him and providing study materials.

According to a report by Asha, every third Delhi resident lives in a slum colony and around 86 percent of the urban poor in Delhi is illiterate. By the age of 14, only 30 percent of children in Delhi slums attend school. Delhi has some 1,500 slums.

Slum children are denied opportunities and very few aspire for higher education even if they manage to complete schooling. Even the brightest children, particularly girls, are not sent to college due to lack of money. Social pressures, the obvious barriers of tuition fees and other expenses, and lack of confidence keep young people from slums out of higher education.

One of the problems all these children face is difficulty in concentrating on studies in a one-room house with their families carrying out their daily activities.The outside noise, TV blaring nearby, cooking and people outside talking loudly makes it difficult to study.