Everyday Lessons

The stitching and tailoring class at "Jan Shikshan Sansthan" The gang with Jaspreet!!

while working with these children, i realized that the police as well as people in general eyed these boys with a lot of suspicion...they were blamed or picked up by the police for little or no reasons (most of the time they were booked under section 109 i.e. awaragardi - being on the roads without any reason). And the result is that even if these boys want to earn an honest living by polishing, they are not able to do so. I did talk to the police of sector 17 and the response in this regard was quite positive...their only demand was that these children should not disturb the people who come to shop in the plaza and they should stay away from the parking lot. We also thought that it would be good if these people have some sort of an I-card that talks about these children and the effort that they are participating in. To that effect, we made the following I-card for the children/adults wherein we are requesting people to be considerate towards these guys - I-card Name: Anike Father’s Na...

Thanks for all the encouraging comments on this experiment (BTW, we have decided to call the experiment as Project Reach Out). Well, the corn-selling experiment was not quite successful (at least not the way we expected it to be...)...the boys were not able to sell roasted corn for more than a few days...there were varied reasons - the first and foremost was the lack of perseverance and hard work...and to top it all, the local police didn't support us...the image of these children was too strong for the police to believe that they genuinely wanted to sell corn and not ask for alms. So where ever they went in sector 17, the police chased them out (i also talked to the SHO of the area but he refused to support us and his reasons were simple - selling anything on the street is illegal). i suggested that the boys move their road side shop to a new sector but the gang was not ready for that and they gave it up too easily. i won't call the corn-selling experiment a complete failure e...