ElectricAid Project of the Month
Narasinganoor Tuition Hall
The indian caste system is based on Varna, which refers to the Hindu belief that most humans were created from different parts of the body of the divinity Purusha. The part from which a Varna was created defines a person's social status with regard to issues such as who they can marry and what jobs they can do.
Dahlits (untouchables) do not have any Varna and historically have been prevented from doing any but the most menial jobs. These include poor farmers, landless labourers, folk artists and clothes washers. However they were associated with worse jobs including killing and handling of animal cadavers.
These jobs were regarded as ritually impure and engaging in them was considered to be polluting the individual who preformed them, and this pollution was considered as contagious. Because of this, dahlits were treated as pariahs in society as pariahs in society and isolated in their own communities, to the point that even their shadows were avoided by the upper castes.
Discrimination against Dahlits still exists in rural areas in the private sphere, in ritual matters such as access to eating places and water sources and entrance into temples.
Today Dahlits are bonded workers, many working to pay off debts that were incurred generations ago. These people can work under slave-like conditions, experience violence, murder and rape - to the scale of 110,000 registered cases a year. Most crimes go unreported, however.
On the 9th of July 2006 ElectricAid received a funding application from Child Aid Ireland (CAI), an organisation trying to build a tuition centre for the Dahlit children of a rural village in Tamil Nadu in Southern India. Child Aid Ireland is a child sponsorship organisation that has been working in the area of Tamil Nadu in Southern India for the past 8 years.
As well as the Sponsorship Programme, which is individual to each child, CAI also has a Donor Programme which has been involved in the building of schools, orphanages, housing projects, and tuition centres and many other projects. It is a nonprofit organisation, in which they are not allowed to incur any overheads.
This project aims to give the Dahilt children of the community a chance to improve their literacy skills, something which would not have been possible without the centre. They hope that the children will be able to progress to further education at polytechnic and even university level.
On the 11th of October 2006 ElectricAid approved CAI's application of €3,248 and funded the building of this worthy and deserving project. This enabled the children, Dahlit and non-Dahlit, of the community to receive the tuition that will help set them on the path to a better life. ElectricAid committee member,
Louis Gillick, visited the site in March. He was deeply affected by the bottomless needs of the poorest of India's poor – and by the real hope that even basic education provides for these people. Tony Barron of CAI reported: "We are pleased to advise that the project has been fully completed and the Centre was opened on May 1st 2007. We would like to thank you and your colleagues for your help in providing this facility which will be of ongoing help to the Dahlit children of the area."
ElectricAid Monthly Draw Winner
ElectricAid's lucky winner of the month is Kate O'Connor from EirGrid.
The prize, sponsored by ESB Corporate Affairs, is dinner for two plus tickets of choice to one of the events the Beo Festival that takes place in August. €100 has also been thrown in for spending money!
