How do you raise a nation out of poverty? Education, good government, reliable institutions, rule of law, strong families, … All these things require educated, stable, well grounded people with skills, patriotism, morality and ethics to run a country and its economy while they ensure that their children after them are even better than they were.

In India, there is one common characteristic of these people. They know English, which is the only language understood by educated people in every part of the country, as well as being a gateway to the knowledge of the rest of the world. The better private schools in India are English medium. While they will teach a regional language, like Hindi, and a local language, they teach English and all other subjects using English as their standard language.

Half the urban education and nearly all the slum and village education is in Indian government schools. Jobs in the Indian government bureaucracy are extremely secure, to the extent that a recent study showed that government school teachers are either not at school or not teaching half the time. Some teachers, hired at about 10,000 rupees per month, will hire a poorly trained assistant for about 2000, let the assistant teach and pocket the difference. The teacher never shows up.

Assuming they are running properly, some government schools may teach English in one class using a teacher whose English skills are at best very bad. All other classes are in the local language. The children do not learn English. The Indian government is always passing laws and trying to implement programs to improve these schools, but lack of funds will insure that there will be no significant impact for the foreseeable future.

Our Mission

We are a small organization with a few funders. We cannot work at the government level to fix this problem, and doubt if at this time there is any other entity that can. We have to take the view you have probably heard before. We will solve this problem one person, or in our case maybe one slum, at a time. In Gabela Lapet and Shanti Nagar there are 400 children who are getting an English medium education. A volunteer from the U.S. recently understood this when he walked into one of our first grade classrooms and taught a math lesson. Our children understood him and answered when he questioned them. Their English skills do not equal those of American first graders, but they are gaining on them.

Our slum children will be middle class adults, doing their part to bring India, and the rest of its people, into the modern age.