Honoring Individuals who stick their necks out for the common good.

The Baddest Woman in India: Sampat Pal, the founder of Gulabi Gang.
She acts like she is running a small detective agency; she behaves like a police officer patrolling Bundelkhand, Her group of around 20,000 members take on everyone - from abusive husbands to crooked police, who often refuse to register and investigate r**e cases. Ironically, she was married off at the age of 12, bore the first of her five children at 15 and is essentially illiterate. Despite all this, she has not only empowered herself but thousands of women just like her. CSR Magazine - Corporate Social Focus; The Times of India Indian Express Aaj Tak

Heroes who need to be talked about more!!!

This Designer Taught Slum Kids to Make Raincoats with Buttons & Rubber Bands. In 8 Easy Steps! -... No stitches. No needles. And the freedom to make many different designs from the same materials. He calls his technique 'button masala'!

India Wholeheartedly Embraces a 15-Year-Old from Karachi Who Is Battling a Rare Illness - The... Contributions are flowing in fast and thick already. Complete strangers have gone out of their way to help the girl

Is It Possible to Build 173 Toilets in 24 Days? This 60-Year Old Got It Done in Her Village! -... When she took over in July this year, only ten percent of the households in Khanapur had toilets.

UP College Leads the Way by Installing State's First Sanitary Pad Vending Machine - The Better India A survey has revealed that just 12 percent of Indian women have access to sanitary pads.

How a Mobile-Based Technology Has Provided 9000 TB Patients Free Treatment at Their Doorsteps -... The health worker and the patients' fingerprints are recorded, which ensure a very high adherence and treatment rate.

BECAUSE THE CHILDREN MUST HAVE BETTER LIVES

A young Afghan woman, born during a Soviet air attack on her village and raised in refugee camps in Iran and Pakistan, decided she must help the children displaced by the wars of today. “Our generation was born in war,” Andeisha Farid said. “We grew up in war. We may die in war. But I really want to do something for the next generation."

For Farid, that “something” was the Afghan Child Education and Care Organization (AFCECO), a non-profit that provided a safe haven for orphans on the streets of Kabul.

Within just a few years, AFCECO was operating 11 orphanages in Afghanistan and Pakistan, providing shelter and education for more than 700 children from disparate ethnic backgrounds. The thing they have in common: they all come from tragedy.

That Farid herself was able to get an education was a minor miracle. When the Farid family first left Afghanistan, they settled in a refugee camp in Iran where education was denied to girls. Her parents sent her alone to Pakistan, where she was able to attend school while living in a camp hostel. She went to university in Islamabad, and returned to Kabul, ready to help her country’s war orphans to achieve better lives.

Besides reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic, the children aided by AFCECO receive instruction in computers and the arts, in soccer and gymnastics, in ballet and folk singing. In Kabul, AFCECO has opened a clinic which—in addition to providing much needed medical attention—gives the older children training for jobs in health care. There is also an active foreign exchange program in place, allowing a few promising children to study for a time in Italy and in the U.S.

Farid takes great risks to educate the next generation, especially the girls—and most of the children in her orphanages are girls. The AFCECO facilities have armed guards to protect against attacks, kidnapping, and child trafficking.

The guards are much needed. In 2010 soldiers raided the home of Farid’s family and led away her father and brother at gunpoint. Farid immediately relayed the news to a global network of contacts and, following an outpouring of international support, the two men were released and returned home that evening.

Not every victim of terror tactics is so fortunate, as Farid herself pointed out: “Thousands of average citizens endure such over-the-top, go-get-‘em methods—innocent people who may be detained for days, weeks, who may even be killed. It’s important to know that this was not an accident or a one-time mistake.”

Andeisha Farid remains undeterred from her goals for the children under her care. “I’m not afraid. In fact, I’m hopeful. I have to be optimistic that we can create a happy future for the children. We have to look forward; we have no other choice. I want my four-year old son—and every other Afghan child—to feel they need not be afraid to imagine an Afghanistan with possibility and opportunity — that’s my dream for them and for all of us as well."

You can follow her work at http://www.afceco.org/

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Inspirational Giraffe Hero from India......

FOSTERING TRUE KNOWLEDGE

Sanjit “Bunker” Roy was prepared in every possible way—family background, education, personal charisma—for a successful career in India’s civil or diplomatic service, but about the time he graduated from college, there was a famine in Bihar. Roy went, he now says, “out of curiosity, to see another part of India.” But he was so affected by what he found there, he's dedicated his life to serving the rural poor; his family disowned him for his decision.

That was 1967. Roy spent the next five years blasting wells in the Ajmar District of Rajasthan. This was difficult, dangerous work, but it wasn’t the work that changed him; it was the people he met. He said, "I lived with very poor and ordinary people under the stars and heard the simple stories they had to tell of their skills and knowledge, of the wisdom that books and lectures and university education can never teach you." Roy decided that his blue-chip education was of paltry value compared with the wealth of knowledge held by these people who were considered by many to be uneducated and worthless.

"My real education started then,” he said, “when I saw water diviners, traditional bone-setters and mid-wives at work. There is a difference between literacy and education. Literacy is reading and writing and what you pick up in school. Education is what you receive from your family, your community, and your environment."

In 1972, Roy established the Barefoot College to give impoverished people from rural communities an opportunity to share with each other their practical and valuable skills. The college is in Tilonia, a Rajasthan village, about 95 kilometers from the state capital, Jaipur, and yet its reach has become international.

As one example of the many projects happening through the Barefoot College, between 2005 and 2011, 140 women, most of them grandmothers, have traveled to Tilonia from villages in Africa to receive training as solar engineers. The African women do not know how to read or write, and none of them speak any Indian language, and so their six-month training course is taught through sign language and color codes. Still, by the end of it, they return to their villages qualified to install, maintain, and operate household, solar-powered lighting systems. They have learned to install integrated circuit boards for solar home lights and off-grid solar units generating up to 500 kilowatts a day. These women are, in short, able to electrify their villages.

In the five years that the Barefoot College has offered solar training for students from Africa, the newly trained Africans have brought solar electrical power to almost 10,000 rural homes in 21 African countries.

The Barefoot College has also trained more than 3 million people for jobs in the practical world. Besides solar engineers, the Barefoot College has prepared teachers, midwives, water-drillers, phone operators, blacksmiths, carpenters, masons, weavers, architects, dentists, doctors—and it’s all happened in buildings so rudimentary they have dirt floors and no chairs. Indigenous students feel comfortable in such modest circumstances; most of their teachers are from the same background and are also graduates of Barefoot College.

Bunker Roy has found an effective way of fighting poverty: helping the poor steer their own path, fostering dignity and self-determination at every step along the way.

EMPOWERING THE WOMEN OF INDIA !!

EMPOWERING THE WOMEN OF INDIA

According to a UNICEF report, 25% of girls in India die by the age of 15 from neglect or even infanticide. Too many families value only sons.

Ela Bhatt is working to change all that by using Gandhian principles to help girls and women become more independent and empowered, financially and psychologically.

Bhatt was raised at the end of the freedom movement; her grandfather joined Gandhi on the great Salt March in 1930 to protest the British ban on Indians making salt. She believes the Gandhian principles of non-violence and economic empowerment can uplift India's poorest women and contribute to social and political changes for the whole country. "Gandhi said that women are natural leaders in our fight for social justice where love and peace, nonviolence, are the chief weapons of the fight," says Bhatt.

It all started in 1972 when Bhatt was a young lawyer working for a textile union in Gujarati. A group of women workers carrying loads of cloth on their heads claimed merchants were cheating them. Illiterate, the women could not check the weights and measures of their loads. Bhatt helped organize the women for a strike, and that was the beginning of the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA).

SEWA organized women's trade unions and cooperatives in which women could pool resources and stand together against social, political and economic injustice. SEWA started a bank to give loans to women, and soon began educating women about saving, offering training programs, providing maternity leave for Co-op members and education for their children.

Standing up for women's rights and dignity, and standing against police abuse, out-dated politics and cultural discrimination against women, SEWA grew to become India's most powerful women's trade union.

Shanta Samal from Gugarat is just one woman who has benefited from being a member of SEWA. Samal does traditionally women's work: rolling to***co into a leaf, creating a "bidi" or cigarette, which she sells on the streets of nearby Ahmedabad. Before SEWA came into Samal's neighborhood, a bidi roller earned about 10 cents for 1,000 ci******es. But now, they earn 70 cents.

And now, when women like Samal are pregnant, they can receive grant money allowing them to take maternity leave. There's even a scholarship fund for their children's education. Co-op members are taking charge of their own lives and the lives of their families by pooling savings to buy communal equipment or to open village stores.

"I think what is important is a woman's own self-confidence," Ela Bhatt explains. "That we can do it. Then we will do it. When you are together you don't cry. We don't blame the destiny. We don't blame the system. We are together and have faith in each other and in ourselves."

HEALING WOUNDS~ON THE SKIN AND IN THE HEART

According to the World Health Organization four million women a year are severely burned; more than half of them live in Southeast Asia, and almost all live in poverty. The burns are excruciating and often crippling, even life-threatening. And yet proper burn treatment is all but nonexistent for the world’s poor.

Chandini Perera MD is changing that in Sri Lanka. Perera is a plastic surgeon who does reconstructive surgery on her country’s burn victims, then helps them rebuild their lives in a society that considers them outcasts. She has established Sri Lanka’s only burn center, a place where burn victims, usually women who are desperately poor, receive the surgery, treatment, and rehabilitation that are often necessary for a burn victim to have a productive life.

Within a day of receiving a burn that affects 20% or more of the body, the victim goes into shock. If the burn isn’t treated, the skin contracts and affected parts of the body become fused. “Then the person becomes disabled, truly disfigured,” Perera said.

“A severe burn is a painful condition, emotionally and physically. The treatment is painful. The follow-up is painful. The response from society is painful. Burn survivors are like someone with a terminal illness, except that they don’t die. They actually live, but you can’t see them. They can’t come out because society will not accept them.”

Perera’s work is not highly valued, even within the medical community. She has trouble getting other sections of her own hospital to allow burn victims into their waiting rooms because their disfigurement is considered an ill omen. Treating burn victims is a low priority for most other plastic surgeons, she reports. They want the satisfaction of making their patients beautiful.

“You can’t make a burn beautiful,” Perera said, “but you can make it better. You take a person who has been deformed or crippled or defaced, and you’re able to make that person better. That person can be functional again. Then it’s the beauty of the person who has survived all of this that comes out.”

Burns are the only injury that happens more frequently to women than to men. Some severe burns happen by accident where open fires are used for cooking. Some burns—all of the acid burns—are domestic violence or homicidal acts. But fully 75 percent of the burns Perera treats are self-inflicted by women who have been so abused and crushed by the circumstances of their lives that they’ve tried to kill themselves.

Perera speaks out publicly about violence against women, a subject people do not want to hear about, but she feels the most important work she does is to encourage and empower women who felt their only option was self-immolation.

The needs Perera is trying to meet are at times overwhelming and the work itself can be exhausting. There were times, especially in the beginning, when she wanted to quit. But the satisfactions of the work keep her going.

“In the clinic a really good day for me,” Perera said, “is when a patient who has been seriously burned, has been depressed, comes in with a smile, dressed well, and says, ‘Did you know my children are in school… I’ve just started a business.’ With that they’ve just given me so much more than I ever gave them. They’ve given me something I could never buy.”

Chandini Perera has helped heal and empower more than 15,000 burn victims.

'Save Our Villages' should precede 'Make in India'. Initiative by a young Indian.

The Man Who Is Using Cameras To Revolutionize Agriculture In India - The Better India Digital Green is enabling thousands of farmers to become video film makers and more productive. All of this has been made possible by a guy who had never even seen a village 8 years ago!

Action plan for a cleaner India!!!

VIDEO: Tired of Complaining about your Dirty City? Just Use This Step-by-Step Guide to Clean It!... All you need is a smartphone and a bunch of cool friends.