Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Latest NGO Events and Happenings

Funds Available for Events Commemorating Rabindranath Tagore

The Ministry of Culture now launches the ‘Scheme of Financial Assistance for Cultural Programmes by Not-for-Profit Organizations to Commemorate 150 Years of Rabindranath Tagore’, known in short as the ‘Tagore Commemoration Grant Scheme’ (TCGS). The Scheme will assist and support the programmes related to appropriate and befitting commemoration of the multifaceted genius of Rabindranath Tagore and his enduring contributions. These may be through lectures, seminars, workshops, symposia, cultural shows, literary festivals, exhibitions, small documentary films and audio-video presentations, etc.

All eligible Not-for-Profit Organizations working for the promotion of art and culture and Universities (including University’s Centres and Institutions, but not University Departments, schools or colleges) are eligible to apply for this Grant. Central Government assistance is limited to 75% of the estimated cost of a proposal/programme, with a ceiling of Rs. 5 lakhs. The Scheme shall remain open till May 2012.

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LIC Scholarships for College Students

SCHEME OF ‘LIC GOLDEN JUBILEE SCHOLARSHIP’ FOR STUDENTS BELONGING TO THE ECONOMICALLY WEAKER FAMILIES FOR PURSUING HIGHER STUDIES.

The scholarship is to be awarded for studies in India in a government or private college/university. It will also cover technical and vocational courses in Industrial Training Institutes/ Industrial Training Centres.

ELIGIBILITY

Students who have passed Class XII exam or its equivalent "Academic Year 2009-10" and are interested to pursue higher education in the field of -
a) Engineering
b) Medicine
c) Arts/Science/Commerce
d) Diploma Courses in any field and
e) Any Vocational course which leads to immediate employment and where minimum education qualification stipulated is plus 2

Scholarship will be awarded to the students who have secured not less than 60% marks or equivalent grade in the Class 12 or its equivalent final examination and the annual income of whose parents/guardian from all sources does not exceed Rs60,000/ per annum.

Scholarship shall be provided for the entire course.

RATE OF SCHOLARSHIP:
10,000/- per annum, `1000/ payable monthly for ten months by Cheques to the Beneficiary.

Last date for online application is 31st October 2010.

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Make a Difference Award: Deadline Nov 15, 2010

“The Make a Difference Award is part of Make a Difference (http://www.mad.asia), a non-profit making initiative to inspire and empower young people to be the agents of change. The Hong Kong SAR Government is the founding patron and major sponsor.

The Make a Difference Award aims to recognise young, compassionate and innovative changemakers. They have two categories of entries: students aged 27 and below and young working adults aged 35 and below.

They are looking for young change makers who have made a positive contribution to their organisations or the society - economically, socially, culturally and/or environmentally. They could be entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs or intrapreneurs. They could also be students who have run campaigns or projects that impacted positively on the society. The initiatives could be in the domain of arts and culture, business/economy, education, environment protection and conservation, science and technology, society etc.

The winning teams can win prize up to HK$150,000 in cash or in kind (an international learning experience or free professional services to grow their ventures.) They will also receive one year mentorship. The winners will be announced at the Make a Difference Forum on 23 Jan 2011 in Hong Kong.

Details of the award and the online application form are uploaded on http://www.mad.asia/en/mad-award.

The deadline for submission is 15 Nov 2010.”

To know more about the details visit: http://www.mad.asia/en/mad-award
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Help Mechanise the Weaving Process for Weavers in Andhra Pradesh

Chintakindi Mallesham, a poor weaver from Sharjipet village in Andhra Pradesh, has turned out to be a saviour for hundreds of weavers.

Weavers making the traditional 'Tie & Dye' Pochampalli silk sarees used to undergo a painstaking process, moving their hands thousands of times in a day while weaving sarees. But not any more.

Thanks to Mallesham's patented device to mechanise this process, hundreds of weavers in Andhra Pradesh now spend less time on making a variety of designs.

Mallesham started working as a weaver when he was just 12 years old. After his seventh standard, he had to leave school to spend more time at work. However, he studied during the night and passed the tenth standard.

"It was disheartening to see my mother work so hard to weave sarees. Despite her shoulder and joint aches, she used to spend hours weaving sarees to earn some money to take care of the family," says Mallesham.

"My father and other members of the family thought I was lazy and did not want to work. They scolded me for wasting time. So it took a long time of seven years before I could introduce the first prototype of Laxmi Asu. While earlier it took 5 hours to do the Asu (hand winding process) for one saree, it just takes one and half hours to do the same work now," says Mallesham.

"There are 30,000 women weavers in Andhra Pradesh who continue to do the weaving process manually as they cannot afford to buy the Laxmi Asu machine. They are looking for help as the government has failed to extend any kind of support. It's time for the society to come together to rescue them from this drudgery. We look forward to people who can help this women buy the Asu machines," says Brigadier (retd) P Ganesham, chief co-ordinator,Honey Bee Network, Andhra Pradesh.

If you wish to help, you can send an e-mail to honeybeeap@gmail.com or to Mallesham at malleshamchinthakindi115@gmail.com
Mobile: 92472 82778
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Invitation for Craftroots Exhibition in Dubai, Oct 29-31

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Sponsors for Diwali Mela for Slum Communities in Bombay

NGO called ASTITVA Foundation is working for the women empowerment through womens Self Help Groups ( SHGs) from the past ten years. We have formed more than 8oo SHgs involving 15,000 women. We works in various slums of Mumbai mainly in Andheri, Jogeshwari and Goregaon. We also work in rural villages of Raigadh, Ratnagiri and Sindhudurg districts. We are trying to make women self reliant by giving them vocational training and making them aware about their rights and responsibilities.

On the occasion of Diwali we have arranged Diptosav 2010 on Saturday 6th Nov,2010 at Kokan Nagar, Jogeshwari - East from 6 pm to 9 pm where 3000 women will be participating to celebrate the festival of lights. Women will perform cultural programmes and rangoli competition is arranged for them.

We request you to sponsor the event in cash or kind. The total budget of the event is Rs,25,000/- You can sponsor the prizes also.

The publicity of donors will be made in good way.

Please support us to make it success.

Looking forward for your cooperation.

Thanks
Narayan Sawant
President
Mobile - 9324028117
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In the shadow of abuse, exploitation: State of domestic help workers in India

New Delhi: Bardani Logun sits on a plastic chair in the communal room of a hostel in Rohini, north Delhi, where she lives with her toddler, and speaks candidly about being beaten, abused and starved.

She is one of countless young women from the tribal belt of India who have migrated to Delhi to find work as live-in maids, hoping to send their earnings back home to support impoverished families in Jharkhand, Orissa, Chhattisgarh or West Bengal. Like many others, Logun found work through a placement agency, which promised to find her a full-time job and a secure salary living with a Delhi family.

The reality was grim. Her employers kept her trapped in the house, bullied and starved her. “I worked for them for only a month,” she says, “and then I couldn’t stay any more.” The placement agency withheld her wages and she couldn’t afford the train fare home. Logun and her daughter, Theresa, were stranded homeless in Delhi until they found the hostel run by Nirmala Niketan, a non-governmental organization (NGO).

As her mother speaks, Theresa runs about with the other boys and girls who stay in the hostel, shrieking with laughter in the glare of a muted TV set in the corner. Other women listen in. Each has her own tale to tell and the accounts are depressingly uniform: a litany of sexual or physical abuse, stolen wages and isolation; they illustrate a wide-spread, but largely unacknowledged, problem.

While there is surging demand for household help in metros such as Delhi, the absence of a regulatory framework has led to the emergence of a shadow industry of placement agencies, spiking from a handful at the start of the decade to more than 1,000 today in the Capital alone.

In the absence of oversight or registration requirements, these agencies are given free rein to recruit and place women in private homes without being held accountable for their working conditions. Worse, in some instances, agents have been guilty of trafficking girls, forcing them into bonded labour or prostitution and stealing their wages.

The problem

Domestic work is not recognized under India’s labour laws, nor is it included under the minimum wage law in most states. As a result, agencies are not required to retain lists of women placed, or records of employers.

“Workers are not being told the conditions under which they are being placed. They might not know how much their salary is, how much commission the placement agencies will take, or when they will get paid,” says Neetha Pillai, a senior fellow at the Centre for Women’s Development Studies, a think tank. As a result many women move from one exploitative situation to another.

According to Pillai, agencies create a network of locals in the villages who are paid about Rs. 1,000 per head for every girl they send to the cities. Grace, who uses only one name, was only eight years old when she was first brought to Delhi, by a neighbour who helped find her a job through an agent.

Now 17, she wears a green kurta and a bold, somewhat combative, expression as she describes the abuse she suffered. “The mother would slap me and shout at me,” she says. After four years of abuse, Grace went to the agency for help. “I cried in front of them and said that I didn’t want to stay here any more; I said I wanted to go home.” The agent refused to pay Grace her wages and instead placed her with another family.

Her next employer was equally harsh. “She said that I didn’t know anything, that I was from the jungle and I was ignorant. She said it was God who was providing me with shelter and a home and that I should feel lucky to be there. It built up her pride to make me feel lower than her,” Grace says.

She was kept inside, even prevented from going to church on Christmas Day, until a neighbour’s maid intervened and told Grace about Nirmala Niketan, a women’s cooperative that acts as a placement agency, children’s hostel and safe house for domestic workers in need.

Subhash Bhatnagar, who has been running Nirmala Niketan for six years, has regular dealings with employers and notes that dishonest agents exploit them too, holding them to ransom over commission fees and availability of staff.

For some girls, the outcome is even worse—the brothels in places such as GB Road in Delhi are full of migrant women. According to Ravi Kant, of the anti-trafficking NGO Shakti Vahini, most of the girls on GB Road are either from Nepal or the tribal belt. Most, he says, were recruited by local agents who promise good jobs as domestic workers.

Unsafe migration

A 20-year-old from a poor village in Andhra Pradesh is one such victim. She was brought to Delhi by an acquaintance from her village who promised to help place her with a good family as a maid. Instead, she was sold to a brothel along GB Road. There she was raped, beaten and forced to have sex with nearly 40 men daily. She was one of the lucky ones—she was rescued by the Delhi police and Shakti Vahini after her family filed a missing persons report. Most women do not escape.

“There’s a breaking-in period,” says Asha Jayamaran, who works at anti-trafficking NGO Apne Aap. “They are raped repeatedly, tortured such as burnt with cigarettes, blackmailed, threatened that their families will be hurt. By the time the breaking-in period is complete, they suffer a sense of shame and guilt and do not want to return to their villages.”

It’s hard to say how many women are trafficked into prostitution by dishonest placement agencies, but villages are rife with stories of missing girls. And once a girl disappears, it’s virtually impossible to track her down.

“There is a big link between unsafe migration and trafficking,” says Kant. “A lot of the unskilled labour is coming to Delhi in search of the migrant dream. But they don’t necessarily know where to look, so they rely on placement agencies, who say they’ll place them in homes. Instead they’re sold to brothels, or placed in prostitution rackets and sent to various villages in Haryana, Delhi and Punjab. Migration gone wrong becomes trafficking.”

Most activists and experts advocate formalizing the connection between agents and employers by mandated registration as a way out of this destructive cycle. The fact that Delhi’s live-in maids exist in a legal and economic vacuum (often without bank accounts or identification papers) makes them virtually untrackable, unprotected by law and liable to disappear without a trace.

Easier said than done

“Yes, placement agencies have to register—but they don’t have to say what they do,” says Reiko Tsushima, a specialist on gender equality and women workers’ issues, at the International Labour Organization (ILO). “Agencies can be registered as societies, trade unions, trusts, NGOs—but there aren’t any audits or mechanisms for labour checks.”

However, this is easier said than done. There have been attempts to regulate the industry since independence (nationally, there are around 11 versions of Bills to regulate and improve conditions of domestic workers), but none has succeeded in becoming law. In 2008, the National Commission for Women (NCW) attempted to address some of these issues in a Domestic Workers Bill, which would require compulsory registration of agencies, employers and workers and regulate working conditions. However the Bill never made it past the draft stage.

With legal recourse not readily available, the only hope is a clutch of not-for-profit organizations. Bhatnagar, for instance, is working through Nirmala Niketan to try to establish a system by which girls can return home, but he acknowledges that it won’t be easy. There’s also the problem of sexual abuse and its stigma in the villages. In fact, according to Pillai, rape is so common that some agencies inform girls at the outset that they will pay for an abortion should a pregnancy occur. But because many of the girls are Christians, they refuse to have abortions, and are consequently excluded if they try to go back. Returning home can be a more daunting prospect than leaving, says Bhatnagar. “Their families don’t want them to come back or get married. In the long term, these girls are stuck here.”

It isn’t surprising then, that despite everything that’s happened to her in Delhi, Bardani Logun won’t go back to her village. Her in-laws don’t want her any more, she says, and she can’t survive alone. Similarly, Grace has nothing to return to: “My parents didn’t take an interest in my life, they only wanted the money.” For most girls, the journey back to the village will remain an unrealized goal.

cordelia.j@livemint.com
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Creative Fundraising - 5 simple ideas

Fundraising is quite a challenge, more so due to lack of transparency and professional management among nonprofits in India. As a result, it’s extremely difficult for young people with genuine intentions to raise funds for newer social projects. How do you overcome this environment of distrust then?

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Scholarship Distribution Programme- Oct 31, 2010- Bangalore

On Sunday, the 31st October 2010, Vidya Poshak has organized a scholarship distribution program in Bangalooru for 190-Engineering/Medical students. All these students have been supported by Vidya Poshak post their 10th/12th grades through its network of generous donors. Along with the scholarship recipients we will also have another 150+ VP community (Alumni/ wellwishers/volunteers) members attending the program.

Time: 4.00 - 5.30 p.m.

Venue:

Udaybhanu Kala Sangha
Behind Ramakrishna Ashram,
Basappa Layout, Gavipuram Extension,
Hanumantha Nagar,
Basavangudi,
Bangalore-19

Interested persons can attend the event and know more about Vidya Poshak and its initiatives for educating undepriviliged student communities.

learn more about Vidya Poshak at www.vidyaposhak.org.in
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Asha Deepa is live on Give India

Dear Friends,

I'm happy to tell you that Asha Deepa School for the blind is listed on Give India (www.giveindia.org ). Give India is India based on line fund raising portal. Give India has reviewed over 3,000 non-profit organizations from all over India to identify 200 plus NGOs.

Give India selects only those NGOs which meet Credibility Alliance (http://www.credall.org.in ) minimum norms. Now, Asha Deepa is one among the 200 plus credible NGOs in India listed on Give India and meets Credibility Alliance minimum norms.

You can visit Asha Deepa at http://www.giveindia.org/m-1133-asha-deepa-school-for-the-blind.aspx. Donations made on Give India are Tax deductible in India, US & UK Tax Payers.
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Donate for Grass route initiative alleviate poverty in Bihar

One of the outstanding grass-roots efforts that some of us fund and fund-raise for - http://www.jjabihar.org/. Many of us use catchphrases like promoting local (rural) livelihoods and reverse migration (to avert the very creation of slums). Kamayani & Ashish (a couple I have known for over 2 years) have turned them into a thriving reality in rural Bihar - by relentlessly infusing accountability into the system, beginning with the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. Wish to help scale up their outreach? aakanksha.singh09@gmail.com

for more details visit:http://www.jjabihar.org/

source from:ngopost.org
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