From empowering women artisans to educating unprivileged children, top social stories of the week

At Narsingarh, a town in the Raigarh district of Madhya Pradesh, IPS officer Veerendra Mishra is on a mission to improve the lives of children through education.

He came across the children of the Bedia community who have been engaging in sex work for generations. However, with young girls entering the profession with the consent of the elders, the community often finds itself at the brunt of stigma, with little access to education or better living for children.

“Three women were sitting on a cot—a grandmother, a mother, and a girl of about 14 years of age. All of them had engaged in sex work, and the young girl was a recent entrant. And she had no reservations or inhibitions talking about her work. I was both shocked and sad to hear it,” Mishra recalls.

In 2002, he started Samvedna—a non-profit that worked with children in the Bhopal slums. So far, he along with Samvedna, has worked with 5,500 children in 60 villages in six districts of Madhya Pradesh—tackling issues at the grassroots level, and ensuring continuing education in nearby schools and colleges.

Read all about his work here.

Empowering women artisans in Gujarat

Born to an applique artisan in the Banaskantha district of Gujarat, Vishnu Suthar didn't take up the traditional craft until he was 20. He took up the work to supplement his family income by delivering newspapers from door to door but, a newspaper ad about a handicraft exhibition changed his life forever.

Suthar decided to pursue the craft and rallied together a community of artisans, mainly women, from the villages of Banaskantha district.

Today, he employs 300 women artisans who produce a range of applique work products that are sold all over India. Many of the villages these women belong to have no roads, power, or agriculture, and their families are mired in poverty. He has been able to pay the women decent wages for doing applique work.

“Earlier, they used to be paid only Rs 10 for a day’s work of embroidery, now they get around Rs 200 for five hours work,” he says.

Gifting education to underprivileged children

Delhi Police Constable Than Singh founded "Than Singh ki Pathshala" in 2015 to educate underprivileged children and prevent them from toiling in the world of labour and crime. Started with four kids, he now teaches 80 students in basics like alphabets, numbers, and more.

Singh oversees 50 volunteers and three teachers. He receives all the essentials like books, pens and other stationary through donations.

“The aim is to provide these kids with education and make them competent enough for school. Additionally, I wish to prevent them from getting into crime by instilling model behaviour among them through education,” he says.

Supporting non-custodial parents

A little over ten years ago, Gazal Raina's connection with her son was completely severed after she lost his custody in divorce.

When Raina decided to look at how other parents were handling the same kind of emotional upheaval, she found that there were cases where children, on becoming an adult, made a choice to stay with the other parent, and in other cases, minor children were influenced against one of the parents.

"This put the estranged parent through immense shame, helplessness and guilt about not being a good mother or father, and resulted in a lost sense of identity," she says.

In 2019, Raina started Milaap, a support group for parents alienated from their children. Built on social media, the group is now a safe space for 300 parents from across the country, in addition to mental health professionals and legal experts.

Meanwhile, in other news…

Sakina Bi, a 74-year-old resident of Gurdas village in Pakistan’s Sheikhupura, embarked on a quest to find her brother, Gurmail Singh Grewal in 1961, when she discovered a letter he had written to their mother.

Seventy-six years after the Partition, she met her brother for the first time earlier this month with the help of Nasir Dhillon, a Pakistani YouTuber who works towards bridging the gap between people separated by the Partition through his Punjabi Lehar project.

According to a Times of India report, Dhillon had uploaded a video of Sakina’s emotional appeal to her long-lost brother. It caught the attention of Jagtar Singh, the sarpanch of Jassowal Sudan village in Ludhiana, who confirmed that Gurmail Singh lived in his village.

Karipur plane crash survivors renovate health centre

On August 7, 2020, when an Air India Express flight crashed at the Calicut International Airport killing 21 people, hundreds of residents rushed to the site of the accident in Karipur, acting as first respondents, alongside fire and rescue personnel, police, and airport authorities, saving numerous lives.

Two years later, the survivors of the crash have come together and announced that they will pay back the people of Kondotty, who had come to their aid, by renovating the Family Health Centre at Chirayil Chungam in the town.

According to a report by The News Minute, they will help build facilities, including a new outpatient (OP) ward, a laboratory, a pharmacy, and a larger waiting area. The estimated cost of the renovation is Rs 50 lakh. The funds will be prepared by pooling in portions of the money they received as insurance settlements.