Asha for Education

Introduction and Goals:
The core team of Kuvempu has been informally working together since July 2000.

The overall goals of the trust are:
- to transform individuals to live based on love, trust and compassion.
- to create a society which functions based on equality, justice and freedom.

Among its many action-oriented goals, the trust at this time is able to pursue the following.
a) to run non-formal centres for working and drop-out children.
b) to run motivational centres so that poor children can join and do well in regular school.
c) to create self-employment opportunities by arranging various vocational training programmes in coordination with governmental and non-governmental institutions.
d) to give counseling and guidance to youth towards job opportunities outside their villages.
e) to motivate youth to plant, water and take care of trees and plants on roadside and residential areas.
f) to work for eradication of untouchability and caste-related taboos in public places.
g) to promote harmonious peaceful community living of people of different castes, class and religion.
h) to form cultural team to perform traditional dance and music programmes for community awareness on various social issues.

Brief Background of the Area:

In spite of 55 years of independence from foreign rule, village life in our area of work, currently Chitradurga and Devangere districts of Karnataka, persists in degrading caste taboos, prejudices and inequalities. Madiga people (Dalits in the narrow sense) even today are not allowed inside certain public places such as hotels, given a separate aluminum tumbler and plate if allowed, not served by barbers, not allowed inside temples, etc. This is not to mention the slave-like treatment meted out to them as labourers and servants in private homes. Among the poor Lambadis, rampant alcholism, gambling, thieving and wife-beating, and in some places prostitution of married women is keeping them in total darkness.

For the poor children, though there is easy access to government schools in many villages, most children drop-out by 4th or 5th Std without even clear knowledge of the Kannada alphabets let alone be able to read or write. Many become labourers, some even bonded for 5 to 7 years by their parents to the rich.

Being mostly landless, uneducated and unskilled, the poor youth take to the path of their parents with the same manual labour, same low wages and same hopelessness for betterment. To keep their minds away from the painful problems of life, they often take to drinking, gambling, addictively watching commercial cinemas, etc. and the grip of poverty and deprivation only tightens as the generations pass by.

It is in such an area with deep, age-old and widespread problems that Kuvempu has entered to focus its modest energies to bring out socio-economic changes and build a society based on equality, justice and freedom.