We finally got to know about our NGO !

Organisation - Nishtha (Please go through the reports on the right side to know more about them.)

Location- Baruipur,West Bengal (Well, yours truly can do a decent job at speaking, reading and writing in Bengali )

Firstly All Hail Grassroutes team for finding this NGO for us.We wanted to work in child education,women empowerment related areas and were particularly inerested in prostitution in India.These guys somehow linked all these three areas ! I mean WoW !

A little background about our NGO - In the remote village Baikunthapur of South 24 Parganas girl children and women were often deserted and became victims of exploitation, torture and violence. The condition of the children, particularly the girl children was equally distressing. Very few of them could get chance to go to school. In the year 1974 five women of this village were thrown out of their in-laws’ house and two other women committed suicide driven by the torture in their in-laws house. This prompted Mrs. Pritilata Das and some other sensitive women to form a group called NISHTHA with an aim to empower women and children.

Nishtha started operating a night shelter for the children of the sex workers of Baruipur  in 2006. Asha for Education supports their infrastructure financially.The objective of Nishtha is to make the children of sex workers well equipped with knowledge, information,training and education. They try to retain the children of sex workers in this school, distribute educational materials and conduct sensitization meetings for local people, government school authorities and other stakeholders. Conventional teaching techniques do not work for these specially disadvantaged children. They lose their innocence and are faced with harsh realities very early in life. It is important to bring them to a night shelter where they can stay away from the clients who come to the sex-workers.Nishtha provides some food to the kids in the evening, so that the children have some sort of incentive to spend the night there.

All our energies would be now directed at finding ways in which we could be helpful to Nishtha.Our plan is to study the existing models of NGO’s that run schools for children of sex workers/runaway children and other children homes/orphanages models.If you know of any helpful resources or if you have anything to suggest please ping us at sepia@grassroutes.in

Nishtha

Children at Nishtha

Miss Mina das with a teacher at the shelter.Miss Das is Secretary at Nishtha and also our Point of Contact there.

This room shelters some 30 children

Did I say I’m lovin it ?