Veena & her husband Virendra Gupta did not look anywhere for help. They are teachers at heart. So when the pandemic struck children from the poorer sections of Delhi, they did not waste time but took to the streets themselves. They set up roadside classrooms & started teaching. It all started when “Veena Gupta’s maid, who lives on bank of the river, complained that with schools shut, children in her impoverished community were running amok and wasting time” according to the September 2020 report by WaPo.

Filmmaker Remi Bumstead & producer Alexandra Zeitlin drove through 10 countries from London to The Gambia in West Africa in their call to bring education closer to the special needs children of Kashmir & Africa. With donations from friends and families, they fixed up a bus, fondly named Janga Bus, loaded it with toys & teaching materials, and drove across borders to fulfil their mission.

Kundan Kanskar took matters of education into his own hands. Vivek Manjunath, Shahid Nizam, Sahil Kaushar, Jay Kumar Singh, Kundan Kanskar, Shubham Singh, Amritansh Kumar and Santosh Kumar established “Save Child Beggar” with the sole focus on child beggars, giving them an opportunity to read, write & eat.

They inspired thousands of volunteer teachers & restaurant owners to come forward with their helping hands. “After coming from Karnataka, I felt sad when I saw so many homeless kids in Delhi. I felt we should do something to these kids literate” he said in an interview with Times of India.

Like everywhere else, ethnic communities have struggled for ages to keep their land, their identity & follow the footsteps of their ancestors in peace. But peace is something that our so called modern, more advanced societies refused to give them. In the US, the native Americans continue to struggle for civil rights, for a simple acknowledgement of humanity from the ones who invaded & took their lands by force.

In India, while the government has in bits & pieces shown all the good intentions of protecting indigenous tribes, the situation at the grass roots are completely different. They are still subjected to inhuman labor, torture and decimation. Lately, more such news are cropping up, thanks to extending mobile networks & people’s use of social media.

While there’s no shortage of inspirations around us, there is also a million things to do. We are moving forward with our literacy programs in small steps, assisted by close friends and families. We would love for you to join us in our book drive & take a significant step towards facilitating education in rural communities.

The post Inspirational work furthering literacy first appeared on Explore India TV.

Late November 2021 we were both blessed & granted permission to set up a library for the Kabir Chaura Math & Ashram in Varanasi. This spiritual organization provides free education to the needy & we hope our library would encourage kids & youth of the school to take to reading.

Balarampur is the home to numerous small ethnic communities, mostly hunter gatherers in nature, and have always struggled to adopt the mainstream educational systems. While government funds have always been available to schools & to provide meals to the students, these have not helped the communities with education in the last 100 years!

Our Approach to Facilitating Learning

We believe learning, especially for kids, is a matter of encouraging curiosity, playfulness and experimentation. With that in mind, our small libraries are planned to be colorful with a playful atmosphere with toys and learning gadgets & educational. Electronic gadgets like tablets & chrome books makes learning interesting & systematic.

Like most of the rural areas in developing countries, remote tribal communities have significant challenges that have to be overcome before we can anticipate a healthy presence of tribal children in the libraries and consequent good use of the facilities.

While most of it is a matter of time, several infrastructural deficiencies add significantly to the roadblocks. Availability of electricity and clean drinking water for example are two major hurdles we are working through right now. We want the children to learn the importance of cleanliness and be able to have clean drinking water while in the libraries.

There is always hope!

While the tribal kids are our biggest encouragement, there are numerous non-profit organizations & individuals like us who are equally committed to making a small difference in various communities. Unfortunately, the very phrase Non Government Organization is marred with news of fraud & misappropriation of funds, there seem to be a new wave of social workers who are etching a true story of what social work really is! They are our inspirations as well, keeping our work move forward one step at a time!

#JoinUs #Read2Grow

You can help in our efforts & be a part of our community now! Click here to read more.

If you wish to donate books, buy learning devices & apps or support us financially please write to us at exploreindia.tv.team@gmail.com for details.

The post Free Libraries for Tribal Students first appeared on Explore India TV.

Join Us in this Children’s Book Collection drive

Parents, teachers and the community can band together to collect new and gently used books for schools, out-of-school programs, child care centers and little libraries at home. You can motivate & encourage friends, neighbors, other parents, club members and co-workers to donate new or barely used children’s books.

Everyone who organizes and contributes to book drives helps us reach more children with the gift of books and the promise of literacy. Read more of our #Read2Grow Program here.

New to Book Drive?

We can help you get started!

Be Inspired & Inspire Others

The post Children’s Book Drive first appeared on Explore India TV.

We want to provide talented tribal youth with the facilities of a modern day community library, equipped with books & educational tools.

It sounds quite depressing, right? So why even begin this tumultuous journey & waste all this time & effort?

We have one simple reason to convince us – it is just the right thing to do!

I bet social workers before us have had a similar conviction but yet their failures seem quite insignificant at this point in time. After all, our inspiration lies within ourselves on the righteousness of the work and knowing that all failures should be treated as small steps towards learning the right way to succeed.

The Institution called Jay Shakuntala Welfare Foundation

JSWF has a successful track record of educating, training, coaching & mentoring tribal youth of Chhattisgarh, working directly with the communities as insiders & extending their helping hands much beyond class room teaching.

Today, the institute feels proud to have mentored tribal students who now excel in scholastic curricula as well as in tribal heritage & cultural aspects including performing arts, tribal music & literature. Their students perform regularly at various regional & state level cultural programs, re-emphasizing with people the values of nurturing tribal art forms of dance, music, handicrafts etc.

Women’s Education Empowerment & Growth

The institute is run completely by women who have an amazing determination to move forward even in the face of the worst challenges of funding, social & political road blocks. The social structure & the administrative structure in rural areas have not changed since the last 1800s!

Unfortunately, while Indian women abroad are flying to space & Indian women are running some of the largest, most respected global corporations in the world, back in the country, the situation is overpowered by oppression, coercion & bribery.

More Engineering & Medical College Degrees than Students

Nothing could disprove that education in India by & large have degraded in the hands on the money-minting capitalists! Education costs have multiplied several times and so have the rate of unemployment within graduate students especially in engineering & medical courses.

It is not that you cannot get a degree but you may not get the right education. Students are often lured into these college with false pretexts and subsequently cheated out of their money, time and career. These capitalists are not alone. They are backed by several, innocuously powerful political & administrative communities, offering them the legitimate grounds to carry on their business.

In such social and political conditions, where misinformation is systemic and the students are more eager to get their degree than to be able to think, plan & execute long term career goals, offering a white solution is impossible! Instead, the Community Library Project is aimed to provide those resources that a genuinely interested student can make the best use of during their student life.

The libraries will be maintained by the local students while a larger team of professionals will be responsible for the logistics, supply and mentoring & counseling those students who seek to use that privilege. There is no compulsion, there is no incentive except for the student’s own urge to read & grow. We will be taking the role of enablers & facilitators. Our mentors will be available for face-to-face consultation, assistance with their curriculum & career counseling as the students’ need arises.

You can help! Join Us!

The pleasures of working together on this ambitious plan is immense. The pitfalls are innumerable!

We welcome educators, teachers, trainers, professionals to join us in our hope that we may be able to offer a self sustainable model to build more such libraries and assistance e-kiosks to aspiring students.

Champion us on social platforms with #readngrow & #read2grow.

If you have any thoughts on how you can be part of this journey and how you may be able to offer a helping hand, let us know. These days we are quite regular on YouTube, Twitter & Facebook.

See Our Promo Messages on YouTube

The post Tribal Community Library Project first appeared on Explore India TV.

We were lucky that in summer of 2021 we started talking to a small group of very talented women at Jay Shakuntala Welfare Foundation in Chhattisgarh, who have been working at the grass roots since 2018 almost single handedly to reinforce our knowledge in our own Indian heritages. Explore India TV has since then evolved as the content platform especially in the areas of tribal cultural & heritage research, ethnic music, authentic folklores & literature & of course for sharing travel experiences.

You would thus see a lot of our updates on YouTube has been on these tidbits of knowledge through various trivias. Since then, our efforts have multiplied tremendously.

Today, we feel even more lucky to have a lot of you supporting us in numerous ways! Your support on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter & all other social platforms including Instagram & Pinterest.

What are we doing now?

Explore India TV & Jay Shakuntala Welfare Foundation has been busy working through two innovative plans at the moment:

1 Supplemental education & education assistance to the numerous tribal communities of Chhattisgarh. This is an ambitious plan to provide mentoring, counseling & financial assistance to talented youths from the various tribal & indigenous communities who are desperately trying to further their education despite unimaginable roadblocks.

This plan also plans to set up distributed libraries in tribal communities & equip them with books & basic educational tools. If we could get more support from our donors, we would be able to provide basic computer gadgets in these libraries so that our tribal youth can access some of the most innovative learning tools.

We welcome you to take a look at the JSWF plan.

We have launched several informative clips on YouTube.

And we have also created inspirational videos urging youth & guardians to further their school & college education.

There are more videos on our YouTube playlist.

2 Rediscovering Indian heritage, tribal customs & indigenous lifestyles through tribal community researches.

For years on end various tribal customs and lifestyles have been misquoted and misinterpreted by outsiders. However, that lack of appropriate knowledge did not stop them from spreading misinformation within their social communities.

This is a much bigger problem than just a handful of YouTubers making spurious videos in the hopes of making a few bucks by misrepresenting the Indian cultures. In many cases, such authors are very influential & inadvertently such misinformation has taken on the mainstream student’s populations in various Universities abroad, tempting people to travel to these indigenous communities with preformed notions and bad intents.

We started to publish more realistic information on such age old customs, tribal rituals and lifestyles on this website as well as on our YouTube & social platforms. The adoption has been great so far!

We continue to seek your support & suggestions.

Join us to Explore India in more innovative ways!

We would love to have you with us. You can support us by showing your support on our social platforms now by connecting, commenting & sharing our work with your friends & families.

The post We Have Plenty of Reasons to Thank You first appeared on Explore India TV.

For years Jay Shakuntala Welfare Foundation of Chhattisgarh (JSWFCG) has been involved with the various tribal communities of Chhattisgarh, from Bastar in the south to Surguja in the north of the state.

The institute, led by women of the area including tribal women, is attempting to rediscover & preserve the cultural, literary, ritualistic heritage of the numerous tribes of Eastern India.

Another aim of the institute is to correctly represent the tribal cultures & ceremonies without prejudice and slowly eliminate numerous misconceptions that have settled in due to misinformation that spread inadvertently by journalists and writers who happen to portray their understanding of such cultures in ways that have benefited them commercially.

The social leaders at JSWFCG work with a talented group of young tribal ladies, who bring with them hundreds of years of cultural dances through heredity, in preparations for the famous annual Karma festival that remains one of the most popular yearly events for tribal dances, tribal music & tribal celebrations in Bastar.

Karma, or Karam, is the annual tribal celebrations for a good harvest & could last several days of tribal dances, tribal music and authentic indigenous food, in various communities. Bastar is widely known for celebrating Karma more pompously than any other regions of Chhattisgarh.

These tribal girls have trained & rehearsed with the performing arts teachers of the Jay Shakuntala Welfare Foundation in preparations for the Annual Karma festival.

The voice in the video is of another talented tribal youth Sunil Manikpuri. Though Bastar remains the most popular location for these celebrations, they are seen widely across the state, this one photographed in Balrampur.

The post Tribal Dances at Karma Annual Festival of Harvest first appeared on Explore India TV.