Wild Navigator was approached this week by India based Not for Profit Organisation - ‘Seva Mandir’ to highlight their social initiative / campaign focusing on children education. We at Wild Navigator understand the importance of child education / social change and encourage our readers to please have a look at their amazing work being carried out by the team at Seva Mandir.
Seva Mandir is an Indian non-profit organization that has been working for 40 years with the rural, predominantly, tribal population in Udaipur district of Southern Rajasthan. Seva Mandir’s work has centred on efforts to bring together and organize fragmented communities through a wide variety of interventions across diverse sectors, thereby simultaneously addressing people’s immediate development needs and empowering them to become conscious agents of their own destiny.
Their Mission
Seva Mandir’s mission is to make real ideas of society, consisting of free and equal citizens who are able to come together and solve the problems that affect them in their particular contexts. Their commitment is to work for a paradigm of development and governance that is democratic and polyarchic. It seeks to institutionalize the idea that development and governance is not only left to the State and its formal bodies like the legislature and the bureaucracy, but that citizens and their associations should engage separately and jointly with the State.
The mission briefly, is to construct the conditions in which citizens of plural backgrounds and perspectives can come together and deliberate on how they can work to benefit and empower the least advantaged in society.
Where Seva Mandir works
Seva Mandir works in 626 villages of Udaipur and Rajsamand districts, situated in the Southern part of Rajasthan. The rural population consists primarily of tribal (68%) and other disadvantaged communities whose resources are severely limited. The area is characterized by rocky and hilly terrain, low rainfall and extreme temperature variations (4-48 deg C).
The local population continues to remain dependent on the natural resource base for a large part of its livelihood needs. Today, the forested and common lands, which constitute 72% of the total land area, are excessively degraded. Only 13% of the land under cultivation has some form of irrigation.
Exploitation by private interests and the resulting collapse of traditional resource management practices, coupled with several successive years of drought, have left the ecosystem, and the people whose lives depend on it, in a bad way.
These problems have been compounded by the failure of the various levels of government and traditional institutions to address or respond actively or effectively to the needs of the communities affected.
With widespread illiteracy, high incidences of morbidity and mortality, high levels of chronic indebtedness, and a degree of economic insecurity that forces people to migrate for employment for long periods at a time under unfair and high-risk conditions, the people’s capacity to engage in, let alone take charge of, their own development process has been severely attenuated.
The Campaign -
We have a special request here -
As you may know that for the first time Seva Mandir is participating in an online giving challenge hosted by Give India – “India’s Giving Challenge”. The challenge is held from 6th September to 20th October, 2011.
Seva Mandir are championing children’s education program in this challenge. Upon raising the most amount of donation from maximum number of unique donors Seva Mandir also stand a chance to win a matching grant, daily prizes and bonus prizes (the total of Rs. 65 Lacs (approx £92,800) will be available to all winner charities).
How much they want to raise?
Their hope is to raise Rs 5,00,000 (approx £7,250) which will enable them to send 250 children to school for a year.
How much it costs:
It takes Rs. 2,000 (or approx £29) to support one child’s education for a year and it takes as little time to make an online donation as it takes you to book a ticket online. You can also donate as minimum as Rs. 400 (or approx £6) which ensures schooling for a child for 66 days.
Why is it so urgent:
Seva Mandir have secured funds for 4,000 children. More than 1,000 children are still waiting to go to schools. Through this challenge if they secure funds for another 250 children then they will look for funds for remaining 750 children from somewhere else.
Please support their education for any number of months in a year. Every donation helps, and no donation is too small to help them reach their goals.
Why rural schools:
Children (6-14 years old) in villages of Udaipur are not able to receive quality education for a number of reasons. They belong to very poor families whose per capita consumption is a little more than Rs. 500/- (approx £7.50). Often these children support their family incomes by either working as laborers or performing household chores or looking after younger siblings.
Seva Mandir is running 188 rural schools (Shiksha Kendras) reaching out to 5,694 out-of-school and working children every year. These Shiksha Kendras are running in Badgaon, Kherwada, Kotra, Jhadol and Girwa blocks of Udaipur district. Each school has 20-25 children. After 3 years a child graduates from these schools to go to government schools for higher studies. Know more about the rural schools. Also,
http://youtu.be/NtXETqw3CdY
and see how by supporting these schools you can make a difference.
How can you help:
You can make an online donation to Seva Mandir by debit/credit card, net banking or via a cheques. Please visit the link to make your donation now http://www.giveindia.org/iGive-youandchildrenofudaipur
The link also shows how much donation they have received so far. All donations are tax deductible (for US, UK, and Indian taxpayers).
We request you to please make a donation to their cause and also encourage your friends to do the same.
You will receive periodic updates from Seva Mandir about the progress of the program you are supporting. If you have any questions, then please feel free to write to Seva Mandir
(Ms. Khushboo Baranwal at rmu@sevamandir.org )
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Wild Navigator thanks Deepti, Khushboo and the team at Seva Mandir (India) to get in touch with us and to showcase their campaign. All write-up and pictures are Copyright Seva Mandir
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