New World in South of New Delhi

Nav Srishti(= New World) was formed by a group of social activists having a common objective to work for women and child development, registered in 1994. This group realized that most of the women were victims of domestic violence and they had to tolerate it because of their financial dependency on men, illiteracy and not having any skill that could help them to live a dignified life. Their children were also living in pathetic condition, derived of their basic rights as education, nutrition, protection from any kind of exploitation and their involvement in development processes. It had an adverse impact on their childhood. It was observed that the influencing people were having an inhuman behaviour and unjust with common people in the community.
Because Nav Srishti have been mainly working on Child Rights and women empowerment Childreach India decided to cooperate with that NGO in a project in Sangam Vihar. It is a vast unauthorized colony, inhabited by street children, rag-pickers, casual labours families, most of them have migrated from the neighbouring states in search of employment.
Children of these labours do not receive the attention and care. Since the community is practicing patriarchal values, women are supposed to be subordinate to men and are easy victims of gender discrimination, sexual abuse and domestic violence. There is a great need to work for education of these children.

Our project with Nav Srishti ensures mobilizing collective action through generating awareness on Right to Education, Right to Information, Increased access to health services, Quality education, child protection laws, and eliminating child labour in communities through intensive group discussions. In a public School in Sangam Vihar Childreach provides a community room which is used for meetings with the staff members (teachers and social workers) as well as for parents’ conferences and tuition classes for the children.
Twice a week Jara and me go there to teach English to more than 40 children in an age between 5 and 12 years. They are all school going children with basic knowledge in English, which is not good enough for a proper conversation. The main need is to improve their self-confidence in speaking a foreign language. Our idea is to teach in a way of playing games how to communicate in normal living situations like shopping. The most difficult about that is that the level of English knowledge of the children is so different. Some of them can’t even read or spell their names. It’s pretty hard to find games for every interests and every level. Another challenge for us is that every session there are more and new children who we haven’t seen before, so we can’t be sure how many children will be there day by day. With giving homework we try to make them coming back regularly and perhaps one day we will have a group of children who constantly attended.