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Early childhood care and development programmes are considered very useful for the children. It is an umbrella term which denotes providing a variety of interventions for young children and their families which includes childcare, education, health, and nutrition, and as well as the parents' support. The first goal of education is to promote early childhood development for vulnerable children. The importance of early childhood care and development was provided by World Health Organisation, UNICEF, and UNESCO for improving physical as well as psychosocial wellbeing of the children's and to develop cognitive skills among the learners to eradicate poverty. In India the early childhood care and development programmes are school based nursery programmes for the age group of 3 to 6, through community groups or play schools where the learners learn through play way method. In India, the institutions were basically designed on the grounds of British Infant Schools and Froebellian kindergartens and were serving the requirements of British rulers and Indian elites. For a normal child, the facility of childcare was mainly informal and was being provided within the family system or in extended kinships. The current study focusses on the early childhood care and development from an Indian perspective. It analyses various initiatives taken by the government of India for girl childcare. Moreover, the author give some measures through which the childcare can be improved in India.

The IBSA forum is an important collaboration of India-Brazil-South Africa to address the social developmental challenges of developing countries through South-South Cooperation. All three countries share same colonial history and at present have developing economies and struggling to provide best public services to their citizens through the appropriate policy planning and introduction of welfare schemes. In the field of education, all these countries are facing problem in the expansion of access of education for all due to the challenges such as high number of out of school children, high drop-out rate, high repetition rates etc. To tackle these problems, appropriate education policies on free and compulsory education have been implemented in these countries. Besides these education policies, these countries have started many compensatory programmes to address the major challenges in the goal of universal elementary education. One of the most important compensatory programmes in these countries is school meal programme. In all the three countries, school meal programmes have been started with dual purpose of keeping the children in the school and improving their nutritional status. This paper is an attempt to review the school meal programmes of IBSA countries to highlight their impact on the health and educational attainment of children especially children from the disadvantaged sections of the society.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In India, Tribal constitute 8.61% of the total population numbering 104.28 million (2011 Census) and cover about 15% of the country's area. Nilgiri district had the highest percentage of (3.16%) scheduled tribe population in Tamil Nadu. About 50% of the tribal population is concentrated in Gudalur taluk, the remaining 50% of the tribal population is distributed in the other three taluks. Toda, Kota, Irula Kurumba, Kattunayakan and Paniya were the six primitive tribal groups found in Nilgiri. The study facilitates to understand the health and educational status of the tribes in 3 villages Kadalakolly, Muttimoola and Thangamalai at Gudalur taluk using qualitative method. The finding shows that there exist less importance to health and education and lack of motivation in progress of education and health which leads to the poor health and lack of knowledge and awareness. The study suggests the implementation of the community organization as a social work method to stimulate a professional approach to develop them.

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.

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.

The article's purpose is to compare case studies of computer technology use at two rural elementary schools across two international settings. This study uses the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) theory to guide this comparative investigation of how elementary school teachers and students in East Texas and South India construct meaning for computer technology. Building off of SCOT theory, the article also introduces the term, "sociotechnical narratives" as part of the analysis of the meaningful descriptions of ways that social groups use tools in relationship to their wider social context. The article found that even though the two settings, East Texas and Rural Karnataka, are about as far apart geographically as they are culturally, similar sociotechnical narrative emerged. The sociotechnical narrative includes: (1) A shared hope in the opportunity and possibilities with computer technology, (2) the development of literacy skills, and (3) similarity in knowledge tasks for the future. The study's comparative research design provides greater depth in analyzing the meaning and uses for computer technology among students and teachers in rural, high-poverty areas across international contexts.

In many schools across India, access to information and communication technology (ICT) is still a rare privilege. While the Annual Status of Education Report in India (2013) showed a marginal uptick in the amount of computers, the opportunities for children to use those computers have remained stagnant. The lack of access to ICT is especially common in India's urban slum areas, which is privy to the "Matthew Effect" (Merton, 1968) where the poor become poorer based in part on the scarcity of high-tech resources. This article's purpose is to describe and report on ICT program interventions that target young people living in India's slums. Specifically, the article examines a case study of a grassroots effort, called the "community computing model," in Bangalore, India. Using Amartya Sen's work on nyaya and Paulo Freire's work on conscientization, the article explains how this model of community computing infused and developed a social justice oriented and deeper "critical consciousness" of the slum community where this computer center was situated.

The focus of this paper is on the assessment and understanding of the gender equity in education in Jammu and Kashmir. Gender equity is the process of being fair to women and men. To ensure fairness, strategies and measures should be available to compensate for women's historical and social disadvantaged. The central government, state government, NGOs and local bodies are jointly working for the promotion of women's education. The paper discussed to what extent the central government, state government, NGOs and local bodies have achieved the gender equity in education and what are the challenges in promoting gender equity in the state? The objectives of this study included first, to understand and explore the women's level of participation in education and to explore the barriers to women's education. The data used are taken from the census of India, report from the education sector of Jammu and Kashmir and National Human Development Report of India. The literacy rate and education of the women of Jammu and Kashmir is far lower than their counterparts and also lower than women at national level. Poverty, ignorance of parents and lack of basic infrastructural facilities seem to be major obstacles in the attainment of gender equity in education. The educational schemes and developmental programmes seem have not helped to improve the condition of girls. There is an essential need to make serious efforts by government, not-for-profit organizations and other local bodies to augment the pace of development in education of the women of Jammu and Kashmir.

Education seeks to unfold the latent qualities of a person, thereby giving full development to the individual. As such, it has been described as the act or art of developing, or creating, cultivating the various physical intellectual, aesthetic and moral faculties of the individual. Scheduled Tribe has a history of social and economic deprivation, and the underlying causes of their educational marginalization are also strikingly distinct. About 87 percent of the main workers from these communities were engaged in primary sector activities. The literacy rate of Scheduled Tribes is around 47 percent, as against the national average of 74.04 percent. More than three-quarters of Scheduled Tribes women are non-literate. Not surprisingly, the cumulative effect has been that the proportion of Scheduled Tribes below the poverty line is substantially higher than the national average. The study intends to explore the state of education and the awareness of the disadvantaged groups towards right to education as a fundamental human right with special reference to Right to Education Act, 2010.

A large proportion of disability around the world is preventable. Levels of disability in many poor countries can be reduced by achieving the international development targets for economic, social and human development. In this paper, the author studied the different contributory and causative factors of locomotor disability, disease states and the significance of poverty in relation to disability in Eastern part of India. Final data were collected from 200 people with locomotor disability by personally visiting each individual and their family at their home or institutes on the basis of personal interviews, discussions with them, their parents and teachers. Data were collected by situational sampling technique and tools used for the study were General information schedule (GIS) and Semi-structured interview schedule. The study revealed that various diseases which resulted in locomotor disability in some way were related to poverty. The nature and causative factors for various diseases which resulted in locomotor disability are malnutrition, unhygienic condition in the pre-natal and postnatal period of the mother as well as carelessness of the medical practitioners. Among the other associated significant indirect causes has been found to be illiteracy, ignorance of the parents, and various socio-cultural issues. However, general improvements in living conditions will not be enough but an integrated and specific steps are required for prevention of disability, ensuring that people with disabilities are able to fully participate in the developmental process and claim their rights as well as obtain a fair share of the benefits as full and equal members of society.

The primary purpose of this paper is to review and evaluate the causes of educational poverty in less developed countries. The basic intent in carrying out such a study is to define and derive the role of governing agencies in deliberately creating educational poverty in the country, so that the private interest of the rich and powerful ruling class can be fully safeguarded. This study is of crucial interest to the common man because majority of the people living in less developed countries are poor in spite of the fact, that almost all these countries own ample human and material resources. However, the common man in these countries is continuously suffering, generation after generation, and has been denied access to basic amenities of life. The rich and powerful ruling class, in majority of the less developed countries, has intentionally denied basic education facilities to its people for keeping them ignorant and unaware of their fundamental rights to share national resources and to gain competence for comfortable living in the society. The paper advocates a complete reversal in economic growth policies of the less developed countries so that top priority is given to those projects and programs that directly benefit the common man in the society. In this respect, the author calls for awareness among the people to exercise their economic and social rights so that people of all the strata can share equally the fruits of growth and prosperity.

The challenges of poverty and development have long been regarded in terms of transitive relationships, in which the rich help the poor because the poor are not seen as able to help themselves. This view of the poor assumes they have mainly needs and no assets. With so many people believing this view it isn't surprising that the poor themselves share the assumption that they can't play any significant role in improving their own condition. Belief in the powerlessness of the poor cripples not simply the poor, but both the left and the right, with each looking to the mechanistic solutions of government or market. Neither has an active strategy for empowering the poor themselves to play significant roles in promoting change. An experiment underway for almost a decade in two states of India is producing powerful evidence that the poor "can" be empowered to move outside and beyond their traditional roles. They can start to pursue individual aspirations and dreams while also reaching out to each other, in connection, as citizens. These results in India are encouraging indicators that may begin to change how one thinks and talks about poverty and development, and hopefully about other, larger issues, including the promotion of change in tribal societies and even the reform of governments.

Debate remains about how to effectively obtain information from adolescents with disabilities in marginalized areas and how to apply this knowledge to shape rehabilitation activities. This study explored how to empower adolescents in the urban slums of North India to assume greater control over their rehabilitation within the context of a local community-based rehabilitation program. Participants included 21 adolescents with and 11 adolescents without disability (aged 12 to 18 years), and 10 community-based rehabilitation workers. A critical ethnographic approach was adopted. Fieldwork was conducted from January to May 2005 and October 2006 to March 2007. This paper focuses on the methodological aspects of this study, and how critical ethnography was used to inform positive changes for adolescents with disabilities using their perspectives. (Contains 4 tables, 6 footnotes and 12 figures.)

While the conventional education system with different forms of E-learning and rigid academic instructive curriculum could not bring desired changes in specified timeframe work at rural level in the targeted communities and groups, a multipronged sociological approach with a sociable and flexible curriculum in new E-Learning programs becomes need of hour. The impact of socializing influence of these E-Learning programs should be properly exploited to motivate and inspire the rural target groups. The benefits of E-learning then become extensive and soon integrate with the needs of the lower strata of the society in order for achieving a rapid social transformation in the lives of the farmers, vocational groups, artisans and small income self help groups comprising women, girls and physically challenged. The paper suggests a number of new generation E-Learning programs as strategies of development communication with a promise of high returns for the industry for its investment in these programs with socially relevant messages and media convergence.

Slavery flourishes in the modern world. In nations plagued by debilitating poverty, individuals unable to afford food, clothing, and shelter may be compelled to make a devastating decision: to sell themselves or their children into slavery. Nowhere in the world is this more common than India. Conservative estimates suggest that there are 10 million bonded child slaves in India alone. Bonded slavery refers to the situation in which a debtor is forced to work exclusively for a creditor in order to repay an advance. There are additional characteristics that are commonly associated with bonded labor but are not essential to its definition. For example, bonded slaves are generally forced to work long hours for six or seven days per week. They frequently receive wages well below those of workers in the same industry who have not taken an advance. This paper discusses India's domestic laws criminalizing bonded labor, its entry into some numerous international agreements regarding bonded slavery, and the four elements of effective bonded labor intervention. (Contains 64 notes.)