Google awarded Rs 3 crore each to four social organisations that are using technology to solve some of the world’s most socially pertinent issues.

1. Integrated water and sanitation systems for Indian villages
Social Awareness; Newer Alternatives, aimed their project at providing clean drinking water and sanitation infrastructure in rural India through solar-powered micro-ionising water purification and biodigesting technology.

2. Motorbike science labs to for rural kids
Dubbed as Agastya, this Bangalore-based NGO conduct the world’s largest hands-on science programme for financially underprivileged children. Through an interactive and innovative curriculum they seek to empower and stimulate their thinking.

3. Improve agricultural training through audio visual training tools
Digital Green Trust , as it is called, hopes to provide Indian farmers with necessary agricultural skills  to help cut costs and improve productivity with the help of a video hub and online knowledge base. They aim to reach out to over one million farmers across 10,000 villages.

4. Apps to connect citizens with the government
The Janaagraha Center  for Citizenship and Democracy will be working on creating online and mobile apps which will allow users to provide detailed feedback to their government representatives. With this technology, they hope to reach out to 15,00,000 citizens across metro cities over the next three years.

http://www.dnaindia.com/scitech/report-google-announces-winners-of-its-global-impact-challenge-in-india-1911920

Don’t really know what to say about this.  Very disturbing that such an intervention is even needed…

They are India’s “Cradle Babies” – products of a government project that permits parents to give unwanted baby girls anonymously to the state, saving them from possible death in a region where daughters are seen as a burden and where their murder is a common reality.

“Often babies are found in ditches and garbage pits. Some are alive, others are dead,” said A. Devaki, a government child protection officer in the Salem district, one of the worst-afflicted areas.

…

But while the project has been praised for potentially saving the lives of thousands of Indian girls, human rights activists have criticised it, accusing authorities of encouraging the abandonment of girls and promoting the low status of women in this largely patriarchal society.

…

Started in 1992, the project runs in dusty towns and mud-and-brick villages across Tamil Nadu. It allows parents to leave unwanted baby girls in dozens of empty cradles in hospitals, welfare centres and government offices

…

Since the Cradle Baby programme began, poverty-stricken parents and single mothers have handed-in over 3,700 children, mostly girls. More than 3,600 of them have been adopted by childless, middle-class couples in Tamil Nadu, officials said.

…

Activists and officials say financial pressures associated with dowries are so great that parents have been aborting female foetuses for decades after discovering their gender through ultrasound examinations, despite the practice being illegal.

A 2011 study in The Lancet medical journal found up to 12 million Indian girls had been aborted in the past three decades.

…

Other parents kill girls or fail to save them from preventable diseases, leading to alarmingly skewed child gender ratios. There were 919 girls to every 1,000 boys in 2011 compared with 976 in 1961, says the Census of India.

…

Officials say the Cradle Baby programme has been a success, improving gender ratios where the project is active.

Rights activists say the improved ratio is largely a result of greater awareness and advocacy work, and better family planning, rather than because of the project.

They say the programme has failed to tackle the root causes of female infanticide by promoting the abandonment of girls and allowing parents to shift responsibility to the state. As a result, they say, killing of baby girls continues.

While it’s tough to prove a cause-and-effect relationship between the ‘youth bulge’ and crimes against women, there’s important ethnographic research that vividly documents the relationship. Craig Jeffrey, a geographer at Oxford, has written an important book, Timepass, which tracks idle young men in Meerut and the social pathologies that come out of this idleness, including violence against women. Speaking to me about the Delhi gang rape sometime back, Jeffrey said, “Rapid social change in provincial India has created a vast army of educated and semi-educated ‘loafers’ among young men.” Jeffrey’s research shows the prevalence of such young men, with poor prospects of a career or marriage, hanging around college campuses and provincial towns, fuels anger and resentment that could sometimes spill over into harassment or violence against women.…

If this wasn’t bad enough, it’s not just violence against women that’s likely to worsen as the demographic transition proceeds. Due to basic failures in public education, as well as the failure of successive governments to liberalise and reform labour laws, there’s a dearth of labour-intensive manufacturing activity in India that would be necessary to absorb the surplus labour force. Just imagine if the young men, the alleged perpetrators of the Delhi and Mumbai crimes, held down well-paying and productive jobs, were married and had kids; with the prospect of continued improvement in their lives, they would have stayed on the straight and narrow. Even if tempted, the opportunity cost of attempting a sexual assault would be so high, chances are they wouldn’t take the risk. A single, unemployed loafer has much less to lose and, therefore, is more likely to succumb to sexual frustration and engage in criminal behaviour.

Education and employment for India’s young is not only a necessity for getting India back on a high-growth trajectory; it might also be necessary to preserve social harmony and help reduce the scourge of violent crimes, including violence against women.

http://www.business-standard.com/article/current-affairs/demographic-dividend-fast-becoming-a-curse-113083000056_1.html