Slum Childrens Need Help - And Go To College

Delhi: Only 30 percent of Delhi's slum children make it to school beyond the age of 14. But defying the statistics and the odds, a clutch of bright-eyed youngsters is now studying humanities and even engineering in well known colleges - with a little help from an NGO.
Eighteen-year-old Babita looks frail, but she recently joined Maitreyi College of Delhi University as a political science student.

"After my Class 12 result, I thought I will be married off as my mother could not afford my higher studies. My father died eight years ago. My mother toils hard as a maid to make ends meet," said Babita.

"I remember times when my two brothers and I did not have anything to eat and slept empty stomach," she said sitting in her one-room cramped house in a narrow lane of Ambedkar Nagar slum in south Delhi.

"On the last day to pay the college fee, I did not have a penny. My mother asked me to drop the idea of joining college. I cried. I did not know what to do," Babita told the sources.

But an NGO named Asha came to her rescue by paying her college fees.
Mahesh, 19, is a reserved boy with an innocent smile. This student of Delhi College of Engineering said he has seen many twists and turns in life.

"Though I got 83 percent in Class 10, there was a mixed feeling of wanting to earn and study too. As I don't have a father, I felt the need to take on some of the financial burden from my mother," he said.

He stays in a one-room house with his two siblings and mother. A look inside reveals a corner full of books with his bag lying on top of them.
According to a report by Asha, every third Delhi resident lives in a slum colony and around 86 percent of the urban poor in Delhi is illiterate. By the age of 14, only 30 percent of children in Delhi slums attend school. Delhi has some 1,500 slums.

"Slum children are denied opportunities and very few aspire for higher education even if they manage to complete schooling. Even the brightest children, particularly girls, are not sent to college due to lack of money," Asha's founder Kiran Martin said.
Asha has also opened up a study centre so the slum kids have a quiet time to study. The NGO is a community health and development society that works with over 400,000 people in nearly 50 slum colonies of Delhi.