Education for the less fortunate in the slums of Bengaluru
Even though the Indian legal system prescribes compulsory and free education for children between the age of 6 to 14, there continue to be numerous obstacles that hinder slum children from getting a good education. The slum children are seldom welcomed into private institutions even under the right to education act provisions.
The obstacles for a child from a slum area in India begins with the first step of documentation itself, the schools need various documents such as birth certificate, parents’ aadhar card, caste certificate, etc, which is not regularised in their families due to lack of awareness. We as an NGO have worked with government schools on helping parents to procure the required documentation to enroll their children in the school. There are many situations, wherein the mother would have fled from her abusive husband and tried to send her child to school, but the school insists on the father’s documentation, which she would not be able to procure. These are real problems that people from backward communities are facing in our education system.
Field trip to Planetorium, Bengaluru
Our NGO began this program of educating children from slum areas, especially those who have not been able to procure access to schools due to various reasons. We have taken conscious efforts to build their literary and arithmetic skills. We have met some gems of students under this program, who would require the support of kind donors to enroll in a school and be educated.
Faizaan Mohamed, a 7-year-old boy from one such slum, is a self-motivated and pro-active student of our slum education program. He shows up every week with his homework and keeps in touch with his teachers through his mother’s phone. He has not missed even a single class and has developed good reading and writing skills.
