asha-munich.de fights illiteracy
November 9, 2007
IN 1991 THREE Indian expatriates in Berkeley/USA founded an international, secular charity organisation dedicated to catalyze socioeconomic change in India through education. The education system in India is a legacy from the days of the British Empire, and it turns out very many excellent engineers and software developers, yet, even today, millions of Indian children mostly from poorer states like Bihar or from low castes lack the chance to receive a proper education.
India has famous elite universities, like the seven Indian Institutes of technology or the Indian Institute of science in Bangalore, that have over the years, been a talent pool for Tech Companies in the Silicon valley in California as well as for many old economy companies in the US and Europe. More than 35,000 IIT alumni are said to be working in North America. Even today children of not so poor families and from the higher castes are grossly overrepresented in higher education in India.
India has a caste-quota system for job applicants that favours those from lower castes, similar to affirmative action in the USA. The result is that many well educated Indians from the higher castes cannot find jobs in India and thus are forced to find work abroad. Many top managers of fortune 100 companies come from India: Arun Sarin, CEO of Vodafone, Anshu Jain, Deutsche and Indra Krishnamurthy Nooyi, president and CEO of Pepsico are a few among many.
Many Indians outside India feel obliged to help children in India, where many are still illiterate and children of ragpickers, beggars, prostitutes or poor farmers are too poor to enter even government schools.
Education promotes socioeconomic change in two ways: A well educated population is one of the prerequisites for development in a country, as history shows us. 300 years ago, the Kingdom of Prussia and the Austrian-Hungarian Empire were the first countries in Europe and the world to make schooling compulsory. A well-educated people provided the basis for the growth of German industry from 1870 on and also brought forth many renowned scientists and later many Nobel-Prize winners. Japan had achieved full literacy as early as in 1900, and Japan’s and Germany’s well educated population made possible the spectacular rise from the ruins of the Second World War to industrial giants.
The second way, in which education changes people’s ways of life is that a highly educated population tends to have lower birthrates. Kerala, the Indian state with the highest literacy rate has a birthrate of only 14 per 1000 females, below that of the USA (16 per 1000 females), while Bihar, an Indian state where illiteracy is still high, has a high birthrate.
The 21st century challenges us with global warming and environmental destruction, and only an educated mankind will solve these problems. Each year 130 million children are born worldwide, out of which 40 million are born in India and only 600,000 in Germany.
If the next generation should be educated, we should focus on educating the millions in poorer countries like India.
‘Asha’ has helped many individuals in India, and recently they sponsored a project to support the widows and children of Indian farmers who had committed suicide out of financial reasons, because they were indebted. A young (Caucasian) American man from Los Angeles visited them and deposited some money in a bank there so that they could start to repay their debt and send their children to school from the interest they got from the deposited money. These widows are very relieved and thankful for that support.
