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This study focused on the experiences that contributed to the academic achievement of students in disadvantaged settings in India. In India, young people in disadvantaged neighbourhoods are at higher risk of underachievement and dropping out of school. However, some of them achieve highly despite their adverse circumstances and experience. Through interviews with 12 high achievers and their school principal, this study explored the perceived factors that contributed to their academic achievement. Data were analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis, and findings indicate a combination of protective factors at different levels -- individual, family, school, and community -- that contribute to resilience and achievement. The supportive relationships that these adolescents have at the different levels contribute to their achievement directly and indirectly. The findings are discussed in relation to theory with future considerations for Indian-centred research that can inform interventions in disadvantaged and low-income urban communities.

In 2018, Nuh, barely 75 km from India's parliament, was ranked by the Government as the country's most 'backward' district. It is a region fraught with many challenges including endemic poverty and simmering communal tensions, which among other factors have contributed to historically limiting women from pursuing higher education or building career aspirations. While the state has attempted to correct this by building new colleges, this paper explores how women experience and navigate these college spaces. Using a critical feminist lens, it seeks to understand the social and cultural possibilities that college life and higher education have in their lives. Findings suggest that while there are major restrictions on social agency within their everyday life, college emerges as a liminal space that provides an 'escape'. The college space for these women offers possible pathways of imagination, dialogue, solidarity and support, all forming the complex matrix of their future possibilities.

Well-being is realised through the interaction of the individual's desires and capacities, and external contexts. Contexts in postcolonial societies diverge from the assumptions of functioning liberal democratic states and capitalist economies often assumed in theories of schooling. Instead, these contexts are characterised by poverty and inequality, cultural diversity, and ongoing projects of state and nation-building. Through case studies of two rural communities in India and South Africa, this paper analyses the role of postcolonial contexts in shaping well-being opportunities through schooling in these contexts. It highlights the contested nature of this relationship in cultural, economic, and political spheres.

Thomas Munro, a Scottish highlander, came to the Madras Presidency in South India as a soldier in the army of the East India Company in 1780. He rose to the position of its governor 40 years later in 1820 and died in India in 1827. His rise was not through military campaigns but peaceful administrative policies. During his stay in India, he defended Indian interests and took on powerful governors-general and other higher officials. He resisted their elitist policies, talked of lack of political freedom in India and wanted to give representation to Indians in administration. He conducted the first educational survey and established 101 schools. In the history of modern India, particularly in the history of education, there is a tendency to view British colonialism as a monolithic category. This paper looks at this extraordinary journey of a Scottish soldier, his impoverished status, family constraints, struggle with British elitism, and above all, his contributions to education in South India. No theory of imperialism and colonialism is available to analyse the Scottish interventions in the field of education. Such existing theories rely on the European and non-European dichotomies. They cannot be used to explain why the Scots chose to support Indians instead of their own fellow British officers in the colonial administration.

As social and emotional learning (SEL) initiatives gain traction in primary and secondary schools worldwide, research is needed to understand how schools can implement SEL in culturally responsive, strengths-based ways with children experiencing poverty. This study emerged from a university-non-profit partnership between the University of California, San Diego and the Akanksha Foundation in India. The purpose was to investigate school staff's perceptions of holistic youth development and SEL pedagogy at two Akanksha school sites. Data collection involved 51 surveys and 10 interviews conducted with Akanksha school staff. Researchers applied an equity literacy theoretical framework to centre non-deficit approaches to working with children and families experiencing poverty. Findings reveal that staff prioritised a holistic pedagogical approach to SEL that focused on parent engagement and youth leadership as strategies to resist and prevent social inequities. We conclude with recommendations for other global school leaders implementing SEL, such as prioritising authentic staff development, implementing culturally affirming practices, and developing positive relationships within the larger community.

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted education delivery around the world, with school closures affecting over 1.6 billion students worldwide. In India, schools were closed for over 18 months, affecting 248 million students. This study estimates the effect of the pandemic on adolescent literacy and schooling outcomes in India. We used data from the National Family Health Survey. (NFHS-5) which covered 636,699 households across all districts of India from June 2019 to April 2021. We considered 15-17 year old adolescents who were surveyed after March 2020 as the post-COVID group while those surveyed earlier were included in the pre-COVID group. We used propensity score matching and inverse propensity score weighted regression methods to account for differences in socioeconomic characteristics between the two groups. Rates of literacy (ability to read a complete sentence) were 1.5-1.6% lower among post-COVID girls as compared with similar pre-COVID girls. Among post-COVID girls in the lowest wealth quintile, rates of literacy were 3.1-3.8% lower than similar pre-COVID girls. There was no loss in literacy among post-COVID girls in the highest wealth quintile. COVID-induced loss in literacy among girls was twice in rural areas as compared to urban areas, and substantially higher among socioeconomically disadvantaged caste groups as compared with privileged caste groups. Post-COVID girls also had 0.08-0.1 lower years of schooling completed than similar pre-COVID girls but there was no difference in out-of-school rates. In a smaller subsample of 15-17 year old boys, the post-COVID group had 2% lower out-of-school rates and there was no difference in literacy or years of schooling completed as compared with matched pre-COVID boys. While markers of vulnerability such as residence, caste, and poverty further amplified the risk of learning. loss for girls, they did not have the same effect on boys.

In this article, the idea of the 'colonial signature' is advanced as a potentially pivotal response to triggers that deepen or act as barriers to intercultural learning. From a postcolonial positioning, empirical data is then examined to consider the responses to intercultural-learning triggers of 14 UK-based student teachers on a study visit to India specifically through an analysis of their reflective writing and interviews. Participants' responses to varied triggers became significant colonial signatures to their intercultural learning. The learning deepened where responses were reflexive and articulated with reference to the global powerbase that underpins study visits to the Global South. Where responses to triggers provoked more shallow comparisons with home, the colonial signatures resulted in closed-down discussion, thus acting as a barrier to further learning. This has implications not only for study visits, but also, more widely, for the approach to global learning.

The long history of Montessori education in India dates to 1915, and it was expanded through Maria and Mario Montessori's work in India between 1939 to 1946 and 1947 to 1949. The article characterizes a century of Montessori education in India as a series of "adapted, competing, and contested framings" with key disputes over Montessori education's intended purpose, audience, and how much it could be adapted. First, from 1915 to 1939, Montessori education was connected to the Indian independence movement as nation-building education, but it was eclipsed by a parallel rise of elite, private Montessori schools, a framing reinforced by Maria Montessori's insistence on fidelity to her method. Starting in the 1950s, other Indian educators adapted Montessori for poor children, an emphasis that continues today with government and foundation-funded schools. Finally, in the last thirty years, India's new middle class has driven demand for early childhood education, leading to branded Montessori franchises, some bearing little resemblance to Montessori's original pedagogy.

The present research attempts to examine the nature of violence and the manner in which it is experienced in schooling practices. By investigating the everydayness of schooling practices to capture the manifestation of violence, it aims to understand the experiences of marginality by locating it on the state-school continuum. The research has used an ethnographic approach for carrying out field work in a state-run primary school. The data are interpreted in the context of systemic violence in schooling and its interlinkages with marginality which is explored vis-à-vis the nature of state power. The relationship between the state and its margins is conceptualised through the writings of Veena Das and Giorgio Agamben, subsequently examining state's role in exacerbating the violence. Experiences of the teachers and children in the everyday practices of the school would be studied to understand the indifference of the state. This indifference is then examined in terms of apathy and othering and finally analysed in their relationship to exclusion and violence. The relationship of exclusion to membership and belonging is studied, and it will be argued that the nature of violence that shapes the schooling practices is a product of the indifferent power of the modern state--violence that emerges from doing nothing when there is an urgent need to do something. It is this apathetic indifference of the state and its relationship to violence and exclusion that would be examined in this article.

This report introduces a two-week workshop on web coding and environmental sustainability at a school for girls in Northeastern India. Our discussion of this teaching project reviews issues that shaped the project's development, outlines resources required for implementation, and summarizes the workshop's curriculum. High-speed Internet will soon arrive in the region of this recently recognized UNESCO World Heritage Site. We believe that the training of girls in particular could help redistribute power and resources in regions where women are often poorer, less educated, and excluded from decision-making in institutional and public contexts. Relatively few code-teaching projects have grappled with the difficulty of working in offline environments at the "edge of the Internet," and yet moving skills and knowledge into these regions before the Internet becomes widely accessible might help mitigate some of the web's worst impacts on equity and justice.

The paper argues that the mother's association with the child's schooling and educational needs is not just limited and peculiar to the middle-class families, as the literature suggests, but it is increasingly true of poor and working-class families too. This paper discusses how mothers from a poor neighbourhood in India straddle between household work, paid employment and children's education and how they envisage and support their children's schooling, at times going against the general tide to ensure a better life for their children. Other than highlighting the gendered nature of support for children's education, this paper, also outlines the nature of the differences and distinctions among mothers from a poor neighbourhood in terms of the family social status and educational levels.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore an employability enhancement initiative, the Additional Skills Acquisition Programme (ASAP) project in the state of Kerala, India, as a case for the inclusive development of employability in college and university students. Design/methodology/approach: ASAP is applied as a case study to examine the employability enhancement initiative in India. Findings: Participation in the ASAP project led to increased measures of employability. These increases were most pronounced in women and individuals living below the poverty line. Partnerships between educational institutions and organisations focusing on students' technical and skill development can help overcome local and national talent shortages. Originality/value: The theoretical implications come from addressing the lack of representation of skills based employability initiatives among students from India in the vocational behaviour literature. Practical implications come from knowledge sharing of innovative strategies to enhance the employability outcomes of individuals entering the labour market. New ways to overcome the reported mismatch in business education between curriculum content and the development of employability skills in graduates are presented. Benefits for diversity and inclusion are also provided.

Teachers' work in India is impacted by the ongoing restructuring of school education that incorporates simultaneous attempts at reform and regulation. Child-friendly assessment policy instituted by the local bureaucracy leads to intensification of teachers' administrative roles, drawing their attention away from critical pedagogic ones. Limitations in policy interpretation are found to be in response to the official discourse of efficiency that manifests in performative measures of accountability inconsistent with the intended reforms. In this ethnographic case study in an urban middle school for poor, teachers' attempts to comply with instruments of accountability while adapting to changing pedagogic relations with their students and achieve coherence in their identities are examined. The paper draws attention to the contrasts between models of good teaching held by teachers, vis-à-vis the official discourse. It argues for a reworking of the existing model of accountability towards incorporating a cultural-political conception of pedagogy.

Field of education is associated with herculean task and innate responsibility of escorting societies forward. Across space and time, it has been an unambiguous synthesis that education should precede any progress or change. It helps humans to understand themselves and better their interaction with rest of the society. Hence the field of education and dissemination of knowledge is very much a pivotal entity in the evolution of human civilisation. No country in the globe over centuries could afford to flourish on the paths of growth and development while ignoring the crucial role of education. Country like India where in there has been a perpetual struggle over the decades to overcome perils of colonisation and social stigmatisation reflective in terms of poverty, unemployment and illiteracy. In order to overcome these bottlenecks 'knowledge dissemination' must spearhead the change. Apart from other funding inadequacies, infrastructural lacunae, education sector in India has also been grappling with certain innate contradicting and counterproductive structures. Hence in this paper we have made an effort to address and assess the nature and impact of these dichotomies over the field of Education in India.

We describe lessons learned from one-and-a-half decades of global virtual immersion practices in subsistence marketplaces, and explore implications for international business teaching and learning in the post-pandemic world. Global virtual immersion refers to bottom-up learning experiences, typically in contexts much different than what we may be familiar with, without being physically present in a specific geographic location. "Bottom-up" learning connotes learning from actual ground-level reality rather than the opposite, "top-down" reliance on prior knowledge. The aim of global virtual immersion is to move learners from sympathy -- a most natural human emotion in response to poverty and suffering, to informed empathy, developing an understanding of subsistence marketplaces in different countries through a variety of means. Students, thus, broaden their global horizons, paving the way for additional learning and perhaps actual immersion, where possible. This process is particularly relevant as global contexts are so diverse and often elude generalities, and more so at lower income levels. This "bottom-up" approach for understanding subsistence marketplaces enables a better appreciation of the environmental realities, social contexts, market-level exchange systems, and individual behaviors of subsistence consumers and entrepreneurs, providing a particularly important learning approach for international business education across geographically diverse settings.

This paper challenges (inter)national development narratives that propose schooling as a way out of poverty in the global South by interrogating poor children's experience of pedagogic and disciplinary processes in an Indian classroom. It also develops a theoretical framework to interrogate the relationship between urban poverty and classroom processes which attends to wider class and caste relations in the contemporary context of economic liberalism and 'political and social illiberalism'. Drawing upon parent interviews and ethnographic fieldnotes from a classroom in a state school it unpacks the term, 'labour class', used by teachers to refer to pupils' social background. Further, deploying the notion of 'deficit view' it shows how pedagogic practice, physical and verbal aggression experienced by pupils and pupils' struggles to engage with classroom teaching are shaped by realities of deeply stratified schooling, inadequate infrastructure in state schools and the relationship between 'labour class' communities and middle-class teachers.

Every individual has a fundamental right to quality education. Yet there are often huge disparities in the quality of education a rich child can access compared to the education a poor child can access. This is true in India. The Organisation for Awareness of Integrated Social Security (OASiS), a social innovations lab in Madhya Pradesh, embarked upon a mission to remove this disparity in the quality of education in urban areas. Tapping into community resources, such as museums, can be an effective way to reach populations that are not being reached through traditional educational institutions.

Although education is a right, it still remains a distant dream for many of India's children (Where knowledge is poor). It is clear that it is not enough to make laws; they need to be augmented by more efforts. Education should be accessible to all if democracy is to succeed. Many communities and groups like disadvantaged castes and women have been historically excluded from education. Devolution of powers is extremely important to make education accessible to children. The article rightly draws attention to the effects of poverty on children's education. As a teacher, one is continuously made aware of the educational disadvantages and disruptions poor students suffer due to lack of economic stability and social security. Unless we have a strong and universally available state welfare apparatus, the education of the working class children will continue to be sacrificed. In all this, cultural values and pressures also take a particularly severe toll. The wilful complicity of the ruling castes and classes is amply evident as their domination is derived from maintaining economic and cultural status quo. So the implications of all these studies for formulation of effective anti-poverty policies and proper education system in India are also emphasised in this paper.

For the first time, in 2008, I offered a world religions study abroad course in South India. The special emphasis was meeting and befriending locals, and the centerpiece of the course was a six-night stay in rural homes. I considered this immersion in a Hindu context to be the best setting for learning Hindu thought. However, the environment was not conducive to that, since there were many other issues that seized the students' attention. All the same, they learned a great deal about Hinduism, mainly in terms of the values that govern the homes and villages. Redesigning the course to better utilize the rich learning opportunities of the countryside involved addressing issues such as hospitality, gender roles, religious pluralism, material poverty, and environmental pollution, all of which seized the students' attention.

Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5, "achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls", emphasises the need for "providing women and girls with equal access to education, health care, decent work, and representation in political and economic decision-making processes [which] will fuel sustainable economies and benefit societies and humanity at large" (UN, 2015). Millions of girls are forced into early marriage for economic and cultural reasons and denied the opportunity for education. Within the context of sustainable development, it is critical to raise awareness among communities that child marriage has wide ranging negative consequences for development and that allowing girls to have education and training can add enormous value to their society as well as their personal and family lives. This study aims to identify the role of community engagement and local community organisations in contributing towards ending child, early and forced marriage (CEFM) through ensuring equitable access of marginalised and out-of-school girls to education and training. The study was based on data collected from surveys that had been administered to 755 out-of-school girls, affected by CEFM in both urban and rural areas of three selected South Asian Association for Regional Co-operation (SAARC) countries, that is, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India.

The benefits of early childhood education are well known, but access to quality programs is a challenge for children living in marginalized communities. Mobile Creches (MC), a non-profit nongovernmental organization based in Delhi, India, pursues the mission to ensure all young children, especially the most vulnerable children, have access to the benefits of early childhood development programs. This article begins by describing the state of young children in India. It then provides an overview of MC, including its three main models of child care delivery (demonstration, employer-run, and tripartite), its response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and some of its recent developments.

There appears to be a globally unifying discourse that suggests Muslim communities are not supportive of girls' education. This paper aims to destabilize such a discourse by inserting the narratives of Muslim parents pursuing girls' education in Assam's Nagaon district. By paying attention to the concepts of "bhal suwali" (good girlhood) and "bhal ghor" (good family) articulated by parents in my study, this paper connects the performances of certain types of gender practices with the pursuit of class aspirations. It shows that good girlhood works as symbolic capital that helps Muslim parents to culturally authorize their daughters as legitimate actors in the field of education, while legitimizing themselves as good family. This paper draws attention to three practices of respectable femininity through which good girlhoods are enacted in the field of education, namely: negotiating poverty respectably, prioritizing gendered discipline, and merging career aspirations with marital prospects.

As the global community strives for the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, particularly, the first goal of 'ending poverty in all its forms everywhere', university students' learning experiences and understanding about global poverty remain comparatively unexplored. This in-depth qualitative study examines how university students in the USA understand global poverty and what it means to 'help the poor' in a year-long international interdisciplinary experiential education program at a Midwestern American university. The program is dedicated to teaching students about global poverty and to problem-solve for people living in subsistence contexts in the USA, India, Uganda, Tanzania and Argentina, through experiential learning projects such as sustainable product, services and business design. The study shows, despite students' expressed intention to help the poor, they draw upon a variety of understandings of global poverty and what it means to help the poor. Contrasting these different understandings, I suggest a dialogic pedagogy with some conceptual tools and theoretical resources for students to better understand their bottom-up experiential learning experience.

British colonization initiated colonial capitalist dispossession of Adivasi-Dalit-Nontribal Forest Dwellers (ADNTFD) in India. Post-independence development continued this trend, accentuated by the neoliberal turn in the early 1990s orchestrated by the then Congress government and intensified by saffron (Hindu nationalist) authoritarian neoliberalism under the recently re-elected Bharatiya Janata Party in 2014 and 2019, leading the National Democratic Alliance regime. Neocolonial continuities and current neoliberal colonial capitalist dispossession and resistance in the forest belt, or India's contemporary 'land wars', are dialectically linked to potential spaces for Participatory Action Research (PAR) with/in ADNTFD struggles. This paper explores the imbrications of the neoliberal agenda, land wars and PAR in India, and by extension, for similar contexts addressing the vicissitudes of neoliberal authoritarian capitalism in the neo-colonies.

Ramanathan (2013a, 2013b) urged scholars to expand the notion of citizenship beyond its typically bounded understandings, towards conceptualizing it as "being able to participate fully" (p. 162). This view highlights the "processual" aspects of citizenship, shifting away from the more categorical meanings that underpin the term (Ramanathan, 2013a; Ramanathan, 2013b; Ricento, 2013). Dis-citizens' ability to participate in different processes is more limited. This theoretical perspective casts new light on the opening statement of an influential Indian language policy report, "The Teaching of English" (NCERT, 2006), which contended, "English is in India today a symbol of people's aspirations for quality in education and a fuller participation in national and international life." India's premier educational research body's imagining English as a benchmark of "participation" in Indian life merits further analysis. This ethnographic case study explores this concept of participation through the examination of the English literacy experiences of students in an English-medium village school. Involving eight focal children from an "anathashram" (orphanage) in suburban New Delhi, the data draws on extended fieldwork at the school in 2011, entailing participant observation supplemented with audio- and videorecording, and interview exchanges. The analysis reveals how the English literacy practices are implicated in the production and reproduction of discitizenship, in order to demonstrate how "English-medium" schooling functioned to exclude the focal children from "fuller participation in national and international life.

This qualitative study used participatory visual research in order to develop an understanding of the educational experiences of urban poor adolescent girls in Kolkata and to elicit their capabilities. The sample comprised urban poor girls who were undergoing formal education at a religious, philanthropic primary school in Kolkata. Findings from the drawings and interviews reveal the girls' ambitions to be future providers and breadwinners for their families, roles socially accepted as the preserve of men in India's male-dominated society. Ultimately, longitudinal research on these "first-generation" girls may shed more insight into understanding educational pathways of girls from urban slums and provide more comprehensive understandings of social mobility.

The Central and State governments in India have formulated programs and policies over the years for children with disabilities in order to help them to enter mainstream society. However, despite these policies, children with disabilities are amongst the most disadvantaged in terms of access to schooling and completion of elementary education, as their needs are not met effectively. Based on my personal experiences, research, and communication with different stakeholders involved in the field of education for children with disabilities over the last 30 years, this paper explores the broader challenges in the current education system with respect to issues of quality of education and drop-out rates of primary students with disabilities. A number of factors that influence the accessibility of education for children with disabilities are presented including: perceptions of parents of children with disabilities and their difficulties in helping their children with disabilities, the general attitude of society, government officials, school staff and infrastructure, inadequate levels of training of key stakeholders, invisibility of disability in community, poverty, lack of acceptance, lack of interest, gender discrimination, lack of awareness, poor physical access, availability of various support systems, and government policies focusing on the education of children with disabilities in specific.

Microfinance has been recognized globally as a poverty alleviating strategy and particularly as a gender equality enhancing approach. There have been immense, intense and nuanced debates in the field of international development, feminist studies and comparative social policy regarding the role of microfinance in addressing gendered poverty. This paper provides an account of these debates and the conceptual and theoretical perspectives underpinning them. These debates are used as a way to frame the dominant understandings of the relationship between gendered poverty and education in the context of microfinance policies and practices. These global discourses are interrogated against particular representations of the same by consumers of microfinance. In other words, employing narratives of 27 in-depth interviews with consumers of microfinance and their kin from India and Australia, the paper highlights how global discourses are contested in the local everyday lives of poor women and men. By doing so, the paper calls for re-casting educational goals, in poverty alleviation and gender equality strategies, as moving beyond access for women to expanding freedoms of women and men.

The 12th Plan highlighted Equity, Access & Excellence as the tripod of India's education policy. The RTE Act 2009 has ensured a high level of Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER). However, the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) present a dismal picture of the outcome dimensions of our schooling system. The Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) therefore, highlights the importance of quality as an important conjoint of universal access, as skill based education will ensure proper employment opportunity. Education is a major enabler for empowerment for all; and in particular for extremely vulnerable sections of the society like STs. The tribal students are handicapped multi-dimensionally, with education as a critical fault line. This paper analyses the policy initiatives to educate and empower them and brings out the bleak picture that bedevil this neglected segment. It contrasts the experience of Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KISS) in terms of promoting gender parity, vocational training, health alleviation, dignity of the girl child and educational outcomes as compared to their counterparts in government and SC/ST schools. The paper also highlights the unique funding model of KISS and its potential for replication. Inclusive growth and quality can work how in hand. The paper strongly argues for government's handholding through "Skill India" initiative and funding unique initiatives as KISS.

Children's experiences in families, schools and neighbourhoods influence their childhoods as individuals learn to act in meaningful ways within social institutions. Many recent research works document challenges that economic and culturally disadvantaged students experience at colleges due to incongruence between their backgrounds and the culture at higher educational institutions. Rarely has early life experiences at one's home and family been the focal point of inquiry. The present article explores the accounts of early family life provided by students first in their families to pursue higher education. It discusses the ways in which socialisation impacts one's life trajectories related to education. Through emphasising on the process, the article focuses on the lived experiences of students marked by constraints due to poverty at home and its relation to the shaping of their academic decisions. In depth interviews with nine participants from Delhi studying in reputed colleges affiliated to a university at Delhi shows how one's economic and cultural position affect one's sense of belonging at home and educational spaces wherein students negotiate relationships and identity that are restructured and transformed while they navigate through them. Attempting to study student's self-constructions, the article shows how formal education continues to function as a project of western modernity creating fragmented bourgeoisie subjects out of poor children.

The growth of private schools in India has contributed significantly to increased student enrollment but also raises certain questions, such as how parents living in informal settlements can support their children's school attendance and seek alternative options, such as private schools, for their children. This paper addresses these under-researched aspects by focusing on the concerns of Muslim parents (who have a minority status in India) living in unauthorized colonies in relation to selecting a school. The data were generated through questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. Drawing upon data from 13 principals and 35 households in unauthorized colonies in Delhi, India, the key findings suggest that parents face difficult conundrums due to geographic and social background constraints. Issues regarding the selection of private schools and the challenges of finding schools are discussed. This study provides a different context that should be used to inform policymakers and educators examining schooling options for marginalized communities/parents in illegal settlements.

Protsahan, a Hindi word that literally translates to encouragement, was started in 2010. The idea of Protsahan was born with the idea to rescue children from systemic, intergenerational poverty and abuse by providing a safe space for girls inside the slums that would offer access to quality education, health care, and justice. Since then, Protsahan has successfully mainstreamed 828 girls into formal schools, rescued 68 girls from forced early marriage, and reaches 30,000 girls annually through its programs in India. Due to a severe lack of education and employable skills, girls are often married at an early age, many times forcibly, and thus become dependent on the men in the family for everything. This situation inevitably perpetuates a cycle of poverty and abuse among women in these communities. To address these issues that have a direct and highly negative impact on the lives of young girls and women in India, it is essential to address the intersectionality of the issues with education at the core of the solution by enabling young women to gain 21st-century skills. Protsahan has gathered a team of highly dedicated and experienced grassroots social workers and teachers who work tirelessly at the forefront of education innovation using the HEART principle. HEART is an acronym that Protsahan developed to describe the foundation of their work--Holistic healing, Education, Art & life skills, Recovery from trauma, and Technology.

Global education agendas frequently draw on the construct of 'school readiness', indexing the developmental trajectories of children to the expectations of school systems. Through in-depth ethnographic research in a village in Bihar, India, this paper examines how normative discourses of 'school readiness' govern family strategies for early childhood care and education (ECCE). To navigate the demands of a competitive and socially stratified school system, marginalised families saw it as crucial for their young children to access multiple forms of educational capital: written literacy, discipline, and dominant caste-class codes. In the absence of functioning provision of ECCE by the state, the low-fee and low-quality private market of early childhood education was seen as a key site through which 'school readiness' could be secured. The paper illustrates how normative developmentalism in education, and the 'hegemonic aspirations' it enshrines, has entrenched the marketisation of ECCE and reinscribed forms of caste-class domination.

India's informal economy accounts for more than half the country's GDP but is characterised by low levels of skills, and considerable barriers to skills development for workers. The Government of India has implemented ambitious policy initiatives for upskilling, designed to catalyse 'formalisation' of the economy, and improve productivity. However, evidence on skills development remains weak. Drawing on systematic review methodologies, this article reviews and synthesises the literature on the practical barriers to upskilling. It finds that access to, and quality of, training (especially for women) are serious limitations, while skills are often under-utilised in the absence of supportive labour market and wider business environment conditions. Training is often insufficiently linked to labour market and learner needs, and the capacity of the training system is limited. Government should increase investment in training for the informal sector, and consider strengthening incentives for training providers to focus on improving training quality and relevance.

This paper focuses on an Australian university short-term study abroad programme in India part-funded by the Australian Government New Colombo Plan -- an initiative that facilitates transformative people-to-people encounters. Our chief interest is extending our reach, through photo diaries and interviews, to understand how participants' experiences are transformative, how their knowledge production practices contribute towards constructions of global citizenship, and where opportunities to shape future participants' learning may exist. We explore decolonial possibilities for short-term study abroad under New Colombo, contextualising our inquiries historically while exploring the concepts of global citizenship and decoloniality -- ideas that provide a framework for analysis. Although short-term ventures are problematic for enabling two-way benefits, we contemplate how such programmes may still offer space for moving toward decoloniality.

This article reports on a Public Private Partnership (PPP) program in South India that provided information and communication technology (ICT) to rural elementary schools. The article examined the current status of rural, government-run elementary schools in India by reviewing reports like the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) in India. Challenges like teacher absences, student drop-outs, lack of electricity, lack of separate toilets for genders, and a lack of teaching resources is discussed. To meet these challenges, the article describes the rise in popularity of India's PPPs. Then the article reports on a case study of a PPP, called the SSA Foundation, which implemented a "one laptop per school" program in rural areas in the Indian States of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. Using ethnographic data from field research, the case study includes a description of how the students in a rural Karnataka elementary school use their school's laptop. The school was situated in a small village where most travel was non-motorized. Walking, usually without shoes, was the main form of transportation. A bicycle was considered a luxury. Most villagers worked in the surrounding ragi and millet fields; laboring, often with only simple tool blades. Wood fires were the main source of fuel for cooking. In this village, the school's laptop became a prized possession. The case study offers a "thick description" (Geertz, 1973) of how the village school's students used the laptop for learning basic computing skills and for learning English.

There is a growing need to understand the global impact of poverty on early brain and behavioural development, particularly with regard to key cognitive processes that emerge in early development. Although the impact of adversity on brain development can trap children in an intergenerational cycle of poverty, the massive potential for brain plasticity is also a source of hope: reliable, accessible, culturally agnostic methods to assess early brain development in low resource settings might be used to measure the impact of early adversity, identify infants for timely intervention and guide the development and monitor the effectiveness of early interventions. Visual working memory (VWM) is an early marker of cognitive capacity that has been assessed reliably in early infancy and is predictive of later academic achievement in Western countries. Here, we localized the functional brain networks that underlie VWM in early development in rural India using a portable neuroimaging system, and we assessed the impact of adversity on these brain networks. We recorded functional brain activity as young children aged 4-48 months performed a VWM task. Brain imaging results revealed localized activation in the frontal cortex, replicating findings from a Midwestern US sample. Critically, children from families with low maternal education and income showed weaker brain activity and poorer distractor suppression in canonical working memory areas in the left frontal cortex. Implications of this work are far-reaching: it is now cost-effective to localize functional brain networks in early development in low-resource settings, paving the way for novel intervention and assessment methods.

In state and central governments, there is a widespread perception that it is the rural areas that are in the greatest need of government assistance. By the same token, it is assumed that the educational problems are more urgent in rural areas. In this understanding, the taluka town is willy-nilly classified as urban, and little attention is given to the fact that as far as government-run primary education goes, the town is worse off than the village (and undoubtedly than the large city). In order to discuss this further, I will narrate a couple of stories. These go back to the very beginning of our work, before we had started Kamala Nimbkar Balbhavan or developed our approach to teaching early literacy.

This article provides an overview of the ethical tensions of preparing for ethnographic research with children in a rural district in Karnataka, India. Such children are at the receiving end of policy and international organisation interest, which alternately frames them as both victims of poverty and conflict and as agents of potential change in their communities. Additionally, researchers must often negotiate particularly muddy ethical waters when working with Majority World children from marginalised backgrounds. A critical exploration of the various complexities is provided in order to develop a working ethical framework. Of key importance is the need for reflexivity when journeying from western higher institutions (the 'ivory tower') to the 'field', a space and time carrying different weight and implications for the participants than the researcher. This article argues for the need to critically examine and weave in the multiple discourses of power that permeate children's lives and engage with children's responses to these discourses. While rural Karnataka provides a case study for the ethical tensions of ethnographic research with Majority World children from marginalised backgrounds, the principles espoused here are broadly applicable to children in a variety of contexts.

The papers making up this Special Section reveal important findings and begin to fill gaps in existing literature about children's and young people's understanding and developing beliefs about socio-economic inequality and poverty. We draw on our research experience with children growing up in poverty in Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam (Young Lives) from the perspective of sociology of childhood and social anthropology. The commentary discusses the papers in the Special Section and calls for policies and practices that argue for social justice for children and young people in political and economic terms and emphasizes the importance of including children's views and descriptions of their experiences in research about poverty and inequality.

Issues surrounding migration are receiving unprecedented attention at the global, regional, as well as national levels. However, a review of the literature shows that there is more focus on international migration compared to internal migration. Further, there is more emphasis on issues related to the migration destination rather than those at the source of migration. Using the cultural preparation process model as a framework, this paper aims to understand the career and livelihood planning needs of those who are left behind. The left-behind families of pine resin tappers in the Changar region of the Indian Himalayas are presented as a case study to draw the attention of career guidance and counselling professionals to this unattended population.

This study examines Indian teachers' perceptions of corporal punishment (CP), the reasons why CP still persists despite a ban, and the ways in which CP controversy reflects on social climate of the schools. Drawing from literature on custodial views of pupil control and systems theories, this qualitative study primarily uses observations and interviews to examine teachers' perceptions related to use of CP in Delhi, India. Based on the data analysis this study concludes that alternatives to CP and successful implementation of the CP ban depend on compatibility between local and national sociocultural norms, teachers' attitudes and beliefs towards the policies' objectives, and the availability of resources. This study helps with understanding educator's perception of corporal punishment as a disciplinary tool to spur meaningful action and change in the society. Additionally, this study creates a context for the policy-makers to develop equitable policies capable of helping teachers effectively to deal with students' misbehaviour and creating safe learning environments.

Criticality is the ability to question current theories and practices in any sector to make them more receptive to social realities. Empathy is the ability to identify with what someone else is thinking or feeling. Empathy forms the foundation for welfare state and its liberal social welfare programmes. The state-led development strategies during the post-war period stemmed from a belief in the idea of welfare state and in the redistribution of resources and opportunities in favour of the deprived groups. The market-led globalisation process has put brakes on the scope of welfare provisions even in democratic societies. The public-funded stimulus packages during the recent economic crisis helped save economies from market failure and reinforced the need for state intervention even for an efficient functioning of markets. Based on an analysis of global trends and Indian context, this paper argues for the need of the educational processes to develop criticality in thinking and empathy in action to help develop a support base for public policies benefiting the poor and the disadvantaged.

Promoting gender respect is essential to the development of both sexes and to gender equality. This article argues for the importance of moral education to support the struggle of girls and women to achieve respect within unequal and complex gender power relations, especially in poverty contexts. Evidence collected from a sequence of in-depth qualitative studies in the Global South highlights the diverse ways that the giving of respect and the struggle to be respected shapes women's lives. We show that moral education has a role to play in foregrounding female voices in order to: better understand the poverty-gender-education nexus; recognise the contribution of women and mothers as moral educators; acknowledge girls' struggles to gain self-respect, peer respect and mitigate disrespect; and, ensure sexual respect despite aggressive masculinities. Moral education programmes which encourage respectful relations between the sexes need to address these highly contextualised forms of struggles for 'gender respect'.

Policymakers have invested significant resources in financial education to improve financial literacy of the poor, reduce bad financial decision-making, and increase take-up of financial services and products. Yet, there is limited evidence on the effectiveness of such interventions, especially in developing countries. This paper provides evidence from a clustered randomized controlled trial (RCT) where a relatively light financial education program (one day of training) was offered to a large sample of women (n = 1,281) from poor households in informal community settings. The educational intervention was a significant departure from the more costly traditional classroom-style adult education interventions. It was based on simple "rules of thumb" and used a goal-oriented and action-focused approach, targeted at changing behaviors. We find evidence of modest, positive treatment effects for some outcomes including an increase in personal savings, achieved at a relatively low cost of training per participant.

Purpose: People living on poverty-level incomes in developing nations face unique health challenges as compared to those in developed nations. New insights emerge from a bottom of the pyramid context (India) where culture-based health notions, preventive orientation and health resources differ from developed western health orientations and resources. The purpose of this paper is to explore how structural and cognitive social capital indirectly influence preventive health behavior (PHB) through perceived health value. Design/methodology/approach: The participants for this study include rural people from Tamil Nadu, a state of India who are classified as those living below poverty level based on a per capita/per day consumption expenditure of Rupees 22.50 (an equivalent of US$0.40 a per capita/per day) (Planning Commission, Government of India, 2012). The study included a total number of 635 participants (312 males and 323 females). Relatively a high response rate (79 percent) was achieved through personal contacts and telephone solicitation, cash incentive and multiple follow-ups. Participants completed a questionnaire assessing structural and cognitive social capital, preventative health behavior, perceived health value, and health locus of control (HLC). Findings: The results show that perceived health value mediates the relationship between cognitive social capital and PHB. Specifically, cognitive social capital influences BoP people's assessment of benefits of engaging in PHB, that, in turn, influences PHB. In addition, the findings showed that HLC moderates the effect of social capital on PHB. Social capital positively related to enhanced PHB only among those who believe that health outcomes are controllable. Originality/value: The authors findings indicate that cognitive social capital has enormous potential in promoting health intervention and the health of poor communities, a sentiment shared by prior researchers (Glenane-Antoniadis et al., 2003; Fisher et al., 2004; Martin et al., 2004; Weitzman and Kawachi, 2000). Overall, from a theoretical, empirical and methodological perspective, the current study offers a unique contribution to the social capital and PHB literature. First, drawing from the HBM and HLC, the findings provide a more nuanced explanation of how distinct aspects of social capital predict PHB. Specifically, the relationship between social capital and PHB is qualified by the extent one perceives personal control over her health. In addition, the cognitive component of social capital influences PHB through perceptions of health value.

This article focuses on the educational efforts of Syed Firoz Ashraf in the East Jogeshwari area of Mumbai and places his work in the context of the increasing communalisation of social life and education in a poor working class suburb in Mumbai city. Muslim community has been ghettoised in the metropolis to specific areas especially since the riots of 1992-93, increasing their vulnerability. For more than twenty years "Uncle", as he is affectionately called, has been running after-school classes for children from the working class neighbourhoods of Jogeshwari and Juhu Lane. He has worked within the system to enhance opportunities for higher education for children, and to end the humiliation and indignity associated with educational failure. As Uncle says, there is hope as more and more children break out of the confines of their locality and step out into the world through higher education.

Akshar Forum, an experimental livelihood school in the semi-rural village of Pamohi, Assam, in Northeast India, tests cutting-edge methods in education in the context of underserved communities and rural development programs. Started in 2015, the school links 42 children and their parents to the vast knowledge resources of the Internet to teach them how to earn a living, start a business, initiate development work in their own communities, and act as stewards for their local environment. The school is developing a number of for-profit social enterprises: a shop for handcrafts, a soap-making business, a health clinic, a community bank, an office for legal and financial services, a laundromat business, and an environmental remediation company--all designed to provide vocational training to teenage students while simultaneously working toward the development of the community. The school functions on the belief that all of an individual's basic needs must be met in order to achieve self-actualization and escape cyclic, systemic poverty. Akshar Forum employs a student-centered model to help each individual student find the most fitting career path and maximize their earnings in a competitive labor market. Akshar Forum is an ongoing experiment that has implemented a series of innovative practices, supporting active participation from students and parents, and making modifications as they asses the efficacy of various strategies.

Secondary education has been a relatively neglected area in India, both at the level of policy and research. Statistical data at the secondary level of education reveals a bleak picture in terms of enrolment and completion rates. This article explores the underlying reasons for the dismal scenario at the secondary level of education by situating it within the larger political economy and livelihood patterns in a rural region. The research is based on an ethnographic study of parents and children from labouring households in a village in Odisha in 2008--2009.