Education liberates society and creates thinking individuals who tend to have the twin abilities to insulate themselves from dogma and propaganda and at the same time to open themselves up, to give their best to the outer world. It is the moral responsibility of the government of India, and indeed of each educated person in the nation, to ensure that education reaches those who have been deprived of it.
The summer of 2014 took me back to my ancestral village in central Punjab, Pakistan where my team of student volunteers and I installed a solar powered water pump in response to a severe water shortage, which had been exacerbated due to nationwide electricity shortfalls. The pump provides clean drinking water daily to roughly 1000 of the town’s 1,500 residents, and it has had a dramatic impact on the village’s economic and societal well-being.
Not too far away from the Ministry of Education in the overcrowded city of Prishtina, Kosovo, a group of eight young girls are working on developing Raporto, a platform for discreet and confidential reporting of gender discrimination in IT. Their weekends are spent in Hackershtelle, an IT community meet-up point organized and maintained by… Read more »