It has been a long time since I used my keyboard for this blog. Anyway I am writing today for a very good initiative started by my classmates here. I am really feeling very happy to be with like minded people. My batch will be graduating in July 2008, so some top brains of the class has come up with an idea of starting some initiative for the help of under privileged section of the society, in short, "Giving back to the society" as they called it. We are thinking on some way by which we can contribute to the society and in some sense to the development of the country. During this period we had a discussion with each other and we are thinking of some way by which we can serve our noble cause. Some people has come up with the idea of Forming some Trust to which only Computer Science and Engineering Department's student will contribute and the account will be managed by the First year students who themselves will decide on how to spend the money for the social uplifting of the under privileged. Some has come up with the idea of sponsoring some child's education through already formed NGO's. Some has suggested for contributing to the fund of some society's which does social work.
My thoughts:: I belongs to one of the most backward district of Maharashtra, the main problem in my areas are kid's education and farmer suicide's. As far as I remember, when I was admitted to first standard in my village in a school run by Zilha Parishad, there were 76 students. By the time I reached 5Th std only 60 of them were with me. After 7th std there was not a school that time so some of them has taken admissions to nearby village schools. After 10th we were 8. The embarrassing fact is only 3 of us has completed our graduation. So there is very high percentage of drop out from schools. Today when I look back to that time I think not only the students but there parents were also equally responsible for such a large drop out. Who knows given an adequate chance there would have been a people just like us (I mean the writer and reader's of this article). In villages the main occupation is farming and parents insists their kids to work in farm rather than attending schools again there are two reasons the one thing is they are not aware and the other and most important is they are aware but they are poor hence can't afford to have some other workers to work in their farms and hence they sacrifice their child's education in short sacrifice their bright future. We need some solution to tackle this issue.
Another problem is farmer suicide's, all political parties raises this issue every time election comes and not surprisingly forgets when come to power. In most of the cases of farmer suicide, the reason is that the farmer's financial condition is not good hence he takes some loan thinking that , he will return it back after having a good crop. But as we know nature is very uncertain these days, hence his dreams crashes with the drought of water. Later for the next year bank refuses to give him the loan because he didn't clear the earlier loans. Then this small farmer takes the loan from private money lenders with 10% monthly interest and can't pay back the same year after year although for the rs 10 he took he paid rs 100 still the loan doesn't clears. I think to solve this problem we need some concrete solution which may include Employment generation through small scale industries or some private banks which can give crop loans without any security like Micro loans of Dr Muhammad Yunus or on the larger scale we can construct some dams in nearby places so that people will not depend on nature largely for their farming.
Let me stop here itself today, will add some more to this once I have a good collection of thoughts by which I can convince myself and can overcome the mentality that "Every one wants a Bhagat Singh to be born, But in neighboring house".
