Rukhsana enrolled in the Agrasar Bachpan centre in May 2015. Her attendance was highly and mostly she would appear without having a bath and wearing unclean clothes. The teachers spoke to her mother, finding out that Rukhsana has been completely on her own for most of the day, unable to take care of herself at the age of 5. Following intense and continuous conversations with her mother, things began to improve. Rukshana started coming to the centre regularly with a proper batch and clean clothes. She has been mainstreamed into the 1st standard of Government Primary School, Sikanderpur Village, in April this year and has been promoted to the 2nd standard within 5 months.
Progressing with the community
Agrasar is on a mission of nurturing the foundations for a caring and compassionate society by promoting safe and enriching childhood through elimination of corporal punishment and facilitation of access to basic education and social security, scaffolded with collaborative and human centred technology
What we do
Education
Under 'Agrasar Bachpan' Program we teach out-of-school children and help them attain age-appropriate learning levels with a larger goal of main-streaming them into formal education system. We essentially follow progress of each child so as to provide need based support for ensuring continuity in education
Safe Schools
We motivate and empower children, their parents, teachers and other stakeholders to show solidarity against Corporal Punishment and apply better, non-violent means for achieving their educational objectives. This initiative to make schools safer is aptly known as 'Kaagaz ki Kashti'.
Social Security
We facilitate access to skilling and placement opportunities and related social security services like identity documentation, social accilimitization, financial literacy, legal infrastructure and enterprise building support for people who migrate to urban regions for livelihood.
Our Impact
Agrasar Bachpan
A mother's fight against Corporal Punishment
Sunita’s son named Suraj (name changed) is studying in a Government school of Gurugram in grade VII. He used to get punishment on a regular basis by his teachers, and one day he was beaten so brutally that when he came back from school he started crying while looking at his mother. He showed the marks that were visible on his body and was so much scared that he refused to go to school.
He also mentioned to his friend that he would rather die than go to school again. His mother got extremely concerned and shared the incident with our team at Agrasar. She requested the team to help her manage this situation. We explained the negative long term consequences of corporal punishment, and made her aware of child rights and the laws against the menace.
Our team also suggested that she talks to the teachers and have a heart-to-heart conversation with them to bring out the “hidden compassion” that each one of us has as a human being. If needed, she can warn him/her if they continue the same way, she can go to the police and file and FIR. She can also seek help from the CHILDLINE (child help line – 1098) or the Child Welfare Committee.
With this counselling, the mother felt competent and encouraged to go to the school, and had a long conversation as suggested. She even brought in creativity from her side and later shared with the team.
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Learn about our Impact Philosophy
Our Impact Philosophy
Even though we understand that designing scalable interventions is important, we do not believe in targeting numbers. Whenever being asked the question - "How is it going?", our team members would normally talk about students and people - successes achieved or challenges being faced in particular cases. We also try to be fair and objective in communicating about 'impact' to all stakeholders. e.g. you would often hear us mentioning that - "Around 20% of the youth who come to our Employability Centres would have gone in similar jobs had they not joined us. Therefore, we need to find even better avenues of placement." We would also talk about children who we were not able to mainstream. We share our successes as well as challenges so as to attract people and organizations in our journey who mean to make a "real impact".
"Choking Childhood" - School Corporal Punishment
A research on everyday violence faced by disadvantaged children in schools of India
| Unveiled by Pullela Gopichand on 20 November 2018 |
We have launched our Research Report on Corporal Punishment, this Universal Children's Day. Until now, there has been very little effort to understand why this form of violence remains epidemic in our schools, what are its consequences and what are the possible leverages to eliminate this menace systematically and culturally.
Despite being illegal, school corporal punishment is an epidemic and widely accepted form of “low-intensity” violence against children, which enables and perpetuates other forms of violence in our society.
It has been a decade since the government conducted two studies to assess the magnitude of the problem, no systematic research has been done to understand the factors that put our children at risk.
Our report addresses this gap and provides detailed insight into the drivers behind school corporal punishment in Gurugram’s disadvantaged communities, explaining how and why children of parents who have migrated here experience corporal punishment at school.
Download the full report
Blog
Corporal punishments and societal attitudes
Legal protections can be important safeguards against Corporal punishments. However legal safeguards shall be availed of in the very extreme conditions and only by certain ...
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Strong Children or Broken Men
I remember my days in a missionary residential school years back. Many memories are great, that of friends, playing football in torrential rain, the mischief ...
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‘Unearthing alternatives to corporal punishment’
Some thoughts to ponder on: Apparently, Corporal Punishment is a world-wide phenomenon. It’s being fought against, just like many other forms of discrimination are being ...
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Resilience
Sharing an experience of a lifetime. An attempt to explain ourselves the meaning of the term – “Resilience”. I learnt this over last one week ...
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