Sure, Dad’s social consciousness is part of his roots, his heritage, but Mom’s compassion and the depth of her love and feeling for everyone - family, friend, acquaintance or just some one in need was her strongest character trait.

It was this trait that made her reach out to a young Swedish couple at the Mumbai airport, fretting over their very sick newly adopted baby as they waited to return home to Sweden. Mom offered them the much needed and immediate medical attention that was instrumental in saving the baby’s life. This episode led her to finding loving homes for over 125 discarded, unwanted, abandoned and/or orphaned children. And years later when these young adults were searching for their identity in a foreign landscape Mom simply offered Dad and herself as their identity.

Six years ago Mom’s frail body ravaged by years of debilitating pain finally gave up and she entered eternal sleep. Dad, Tushar, (my brother), & I decided we would honor her memory and advance her most cherished desire to help as many disadvantaged children as we could. As our very first endeavor we have been lucky to find a kindred spirit in Ms. Anuradha Bhosale who leads AVANI in Kolhapur, India who has made it her life’s work to rescue children from poverty and its resulting ills.

Under the auspices of The Gandhi Worldwide Education Institute Dad and special friends have set up, and we have partnered with my brother’s Mahatma Gandhi Foundation to help Ms. Bhosale and the kids at AVANI get adequate housing, vocational & educational guidance.

To this end we are being helped by local volunteers with means and materials and sustainable architectural and structural help from volunteers informally provided from CalEarth in California.

Surely Mom’s indomitable spirit lives on in her Blessings that are always with us.

In Loving Memory,

Archana Prasad

It is a sad commentary on our civilization that millions of children all over the world are denied basic amenities like, food, shelter, clothes and education.  If civilization is measured by the way it treats its children then we are far from being a civilized society.

In the almost eighty years of my life I have seen poverty in Africa, Asia and the United States but the tragedy of this state of affairs hit me when a few years ago I ran into a five year old boy, grossly malnourished, dirty and dressed in rags.  He was on a commuter train in Mumbai pleading with me to buy some candy that he carried in a little tin box.

I was intrigued that this little kid was hopping on and off trains something I wouldn’t have allowed my five year old to do.  His story was pathetic. 

Every morning he was sent out of their shanty with a tin full of home made candy with strict instructions to sell them all and bring the money home if he wanted food to eat.  If he did not bring enough he did not get anything to eat.  When I met him it was almost six in the evening and he still had half a tin full of candy.  No wonder the kid was emancipated.

I could have bought the tin of candies and saved his day but what would he do after that.  It was around this time that I met Ms. Anuradha Bhosale in Kolhapur, 300 miles south of Mumbai in India.  She was doing just what I wanted to do and so we decided to partner and support each other.

I came back to the US and along with friends we established the Gandhi Worldwide Education Institute to raise money to save and shelter children threatened by poverty, prostitution and child slavery.

The program that we conceived is more ambitious than that.  Rescuing children and giving them education would only alienate them from their families.  My experience is that children become ashamed of the poverty in which their parents live and so they abandon them breaking up the family unit.  This is counter-productive.  Eventually the plan is to rescue the entire family and give the family the means to break out of poverty.

Keeping the family intact is very important.

Of course, none of this can happen without all of us pooling our resources together.  We not only need expertise, and volunteer help but also money.  A few years ago I was at a middle school in Portland, Oregon, where I spoke to the children about the plight of the kids I had met in India.  The children asked, what can we do?  I suggested that they save a little of the pocket money and create a fund.  It was an off the cuff response and I did not expect much.

I was amazed that not only the children of the whole school saved some of their pocket money but also held bake sales and, along with their teachers, found other ways of raising some money and within a few months sent me a check for more than $4000. If children can do this surely as adults we can do better.

Imagine what we can do if 100,000 people decide to donate $3 a month (just 10 cents per day) for 12 months?  It could transform the lives of thousands of children and their families.  Is this too much to ask?

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AVANI, Gandhi Worldwide Education Institute and Mahatma Gandhi Foundation came together with an intention to serve the children and in doing so serve whom Bapu (Gandhi) held dearest, ‘Poorest of poor and weakest of weak’.

‘Child trafficking’ is a newly coined fancy term for the age old practice of exploiting and abusing the weak and vulnerable. Children the world over are imperilled due to strife, due to vulnerability and due to the abject helplessness of their parents due to extreme poverty.

Bapu had said that “poverty and hunger are the greatest violence against humanity.” This phenomenon exists all over the world but one must start somewhere and since all three organisations have synergistic relationship and AVANI and Anuradha Bhosale are already working amongst children in peril. A trusteeship of intentions was thus formed between the three organisations, AVANI, GWEI and MGF.

AVANI has been active in the field of child and women’s rights since long prior to the establishment of GWEI.

In 2008 Gandhi Worldwide Education Institute was formed to address the plight of impoverished children in India and throughout the world, and to raise funds to build the Gandhi Education Center in Kolhapur. Mahatma Gandhi Foundation purchased 5 acres of land in Vashi outside Kolhapur on the Kolhapur Goa Road. AVANI accepted responsibility to manage the Gandhi Education Centre and its day to day activities.

Intentions, actions and responsibilities

• A secure residence for the girls of AVANI.
• An education and vocational training centre for girls and boys, an ecologically responsible model of sustainable living and a nucleus for sustainable community service center, serving the needs of the neighbouring communities and villages.
• A step towards actualising Gandhi’s dream of bringing about true freedom for the communities in the vicinity of the Gandhi Education Center at Vashi.

One more dimension

One more association has been added to help realise the dream shared by the confluence of the trusteeship triumvirate: CalEarth an organisation pioneering affordable, sustainable and people friendly building technology in California has informally loaned several volunteer apprentices to AVANI, GWEI and MGF to help the trusteeship build the first phase of the Gandhi Education Centre’s campus at Vashi.

Thus with four differently capable organisations forming a trust of their abilities, intentions and will the imperilled children of Kolhapur will be able to finally realise their dream of a safe, secure and equitable future, free of deprivation, free of insecurity, free of starvation and free of the danger of being exploited.

A safe passage to a better future is the fundamental intention.

—-

Tushar A. Gandhi is the great-grandson of M.K. Gandhi.  In addition to serving on several NGO boards, including Gandhi Worldwide Education Institute, he is founder of Mahatma Gandhi Foundation, of which he is currently the managing trustee.  In 2005, Tushar Gandhi commemorated the 75th anniversary of the Dandi Kooch (Gandhi’s Salt March) by organising a re-enactment of the 241-mile long walk. He walked the entire stretch and was instrumental in getting the prime minister to declare the route from Sabarmati Ashram to Dandi a historic heritage route. He is the author of Let’s Kill Gandhi: A definitive study of the Hindu Fundamentalist plot to assassinate Gandhi.  Tushar lives in Mumbai with his wife Sonal and children Vivan and Kasturi.

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Anti Child Labor and Women’s Rights Hero from India, Anuradha Bhosale, to Speak at Vanguard University

Open to the public, renowned grassroots women’s rights and anti-child labor activist based in the Kolhapur district of India will speak Monday April 15^th at 7:30 at Vanguard University Heath Building Room 100

Orange County CA – April 14, 2013: Anuradha Bhosale is a renowned grassroots women’s rights and anti-child labor activist based in the Kolhapur district, Maharashtra, India where more than 35,000 children are involved in daily labor for local industries.  A former child-laborer herself at the age of six, she has spent the past 20 years fighting for the prevention of child exploitation, sex trafficking, and female infanticide.

Ms. Bhosale will be sharing about her work with the mothers of child-slaves. Through literacy education for the mothers, she has discovered ways to keep children off the streets. This special event is open to everyone, and will be hosted on the Vanguard University campus in the Heath Building, Room 100 at 7:30pm.

Location:   55 Fair Drive, Costa Mesa, CA 92626

Anuradha Bhosale is a highly cherished hero to thousands of impoverished children and their families.  Dr. Sunilkumar Lavate, Dean of Mahaveer College, Kolhapur has described Ms. Bhosale as the “Bandit Queen” of India’s Social Movement.

“We are excited for the Vanguard community members and students to hear Anuradha’s story and mission,” said Sandra Morgan, Vanguard’s Global Center for Women & Justice.

Noted peace and child labor reform activist, Arun Gandhi, grandson of M.K. Gandhi and founder of Gandhi Worldwide Education Institute has called Anuradha Bhosale “a hero to thousands and a tireless champion against the evil twin sisters of child poverty and slavery.”

As founder of the WCRC (Women and Child Rights Campaign), Ms. Bhosale has educated, trained and empowered thousands of widowed, divorced and deprived women in the rural areas of India to stand up and fight for their rights as allowed by the Indian constitution. 52,000 of them now receive some $714,000 in monthly government pension checks they were previously unaware of being entitled to.

As founder of the AVANI organization, she has facilitated the rescue of 541 child laborers, provided 5,604 nomadic migrant children and school drop outs the right to health care and education, organized the construction of schools inside the brickyard labor camps and established a residential home for migrant children.

About Vanguard University & The Global Center for Women & Justice

Vanguard University is a private, Christian university of liberal arts and professional studies equipping students for a Spirit-empowered life of Christ-centered leadership and service. Ranked one of the top Christian universities by The U.S. News & World Report.

The Global Center for Women & Justice at Vanguard University is a faith-based organization that exists to advance the global status of women through research, education, advocacy, collaboration and hope.  The Center promotes gender reconciliation and the inherent dignity of all persons.

About Gandhi Worldwide Education Institute

The Gandhi Worldwide Education Institute, a 501c-3 charitable organization, has embarked on an ambitious multi-pronged program to help eradicate the scourge of poverty and human degradation. “Poverty is the worst form of violence,” M.K. Gandhi said. The priority of the GWEI is to rescue children from the poorest sections of Indian society, those who are the first to become victims of criminal gangs; the second priority is to build local institutions that serve as shelters and learning centers, where the rescued children will receive essential nutrition and education – nourishment for body, mind, and soul. Visit the Gandhi Worldwide Education Institute website and blog at www.gandhiforchildren.org for further information or to place a donation.

10-10-10

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1) "If we are to teach real peace in this world…we shall have to begin with the children."
2) “By education I mean an all-round drawing out of the best in the child and man; body, mind and spirit.”
3) “Character alone will have real effect on the masses.”
4) “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
5) “The principle of majority does not work when differences on fundamentals are involved.”
6) “It is much more difficult to live for non-violence than to die for it.”
7) “Ahimsa is one of the world’s great principles which no power on earth can wipe out.”
8) “Whatever you do may be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.”
9) “Be the change you want to see in the world.”

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Excerpt from Whitey Flagg's ShelterSpace blog

In September I returned to Southern California to begin my long-term apprenticeship at Cal-Earth.

I learned Super-adobe and many different types of foundations, flooring, plastering, waterproofing, and much more. I have been studying Permaculture for some time but was also able to participate in a PDC course and finally receive my certificate. As a bonus, this course ended with an unexpected visit from Geoff and Nadia Lawton who gave a one day lecture on “Greening the Mojave Desert”.

While I was teaching a workshop on how to build an emergency sandbag shelter, we received a visit from Lynnea Bylund of Catalyst House, a strategic alliance  consultancy, and her guest, Tushar Gandhi, great grandson of the Mahatma. Lynnea and Tushar sit on the Board of Gandhi Worldwide Education Institute, a benefactor of the AVANI Organization, which provides child labor rescue and women’s advocacy in India. Together, the two organizations are building a residence for children and an educational facility near the town of Kolhapur.

Lynnea became interested in Cal-Earth last year and subsequently convinced the Gandhi organization to build all of the AVANI housing using these techniques. One of the other apprentices, Xavier, and myself, offered to come to India to volunteer for the project. We did not hear back and expected that we were not going but then received an email in early December from lynnea asking if we could come by 3 January!

So, here I am in Kolhapur. I was invited to attend a great celebration at AVANI last night. It was a birthday party for all 38 of the children who live here. They all celebrate their birthday together because 90% of them do not know when they were born. This date was chosen because it is the birth date of Savitribai Jyotirao Phule, who is a respected women’s rights activist from the 19th century.

The attached photos were mostly taken by the children. I taught them how to use my camera and nearly did not get it back with the constant yelling from all of them “Me! Me! One more! One more!”

>> Read more and see the children's pictures at ShelterSpace

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Images by Scott Kafora / Teysha

For the past 17 years, Anuradha Bhosale has lived the path of Dharma yoga in selfless service to India's forgotten children. After she graduated from the Tata School of Social Sciences, Anuradha chose to begin social work in the slums of Kolhapur, 200 miles south of Mumbai. There she founded Avani, whose name implies what it is doing for the exploited children of that area: providing food, clothing, shelter, and education.

More than 80 million children in India are involved in child labor, street begging, or sexual trafficking, and about 35,000 of them are in Kolhapur, famous for its brickyards. That's where you will find many of these children and their migrant parents who travel from one area to another seeking work that usually involves their children. In the brickyards, children as young as five years old carry heavy bricks to dry in the sun or mix water, straw, clay, and ash by stomping in it, thigh high. They try not to breathe near the baking ovens where deadly carbon monoxide fumes leak from the coking coal.

Local police and concerned citizens keep Bhosale informed of children needing rescue like the nine-year-old girl who was seen tending donkeys. The girl, who had been sold by her drunken father to the owner of a brick kiln, and her sister and brother, who were begging on the streets of Kolhapur, were brought to Avani. For the first time in their lives, they are attending school.

Bhosale was recently nominated for Global Exchange's People's Choice Award for human rights. She has a unique understanding of the life of exploited child laborers because she was one of those children until a man offered her a job and schooling. “He gave me an opportunity,” she says, something she is offering the children she has rescued. To date, she has given shelter to more than 341 child laborers and provided education and healthcare for more than 5,700 of those in the Kohlapur area. Her regret is that she has not had room in her facility to care for more than 30 children at one time.

Now Arun Gandhi, grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, has opened up another opportunity for Bhosale's Avani and the exploited children in the Kohlapur district. His organization, Gandhi Worldwide Education Institute (GWEI), has purchased farmland outside Kohlapur where The Gandhi Center for Learning is being built to house and train these children and offer counseling to their parents. The children will live at the facility, learn a trade, receive tutoring for their studies at government schools, and be prepared to enter the work force when they are of age. 

Bhosale also knows from experience that women in India, especially those who are widowed or divorced, can be exploited. For that reason, she founded the Women and Child Rights Campaign, which has trained and empowered thousands of rural Indian women to stand up for their rights to government pension checks and other entitlements.

The Gandhi Center for Learning will give Anuradha Bhosale the opportunity she has been dreaming of since the founding of Avani: a place large enough to contain up to 100 children–children who, without Bhosale's Dharma yoga, would be just another sad statistic.

– This story appeared in the Nov-Dec issue of Yoga Chicago

…………..

Catherine L. Pezdirtz is a freelance writer and a board member of the Gandhi Worldwide Education Institute (GWEI), whose U.S. headquarters is northwest of Chicago in Wauconda, Illinois. She maybe emailed at catherine.pezdirtz@gandhiforchildren.org

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Mother, I'm off to buy some sweets, I'll be back quickly to do my homework.

Those were the last words 13-year-old Shivam Singh's mum heard from him. He never returned, becoming one of the 50,000 children who go missing every year in India.

"My son left his books open, put on his sandals, combed his hair and ran out," Madam Pinky Singh recalled tearfully of the fateful evening in July when Shivam popped out of the house.

"It was the last time I saw him." Three months on, Madam Pinky is terrified by what may have befallen him.

"I just pray that he is not forced into drugs or begging. He is a very innocent and studious boy," she said.

Source: AsiaOne.com -

According to recent crime data, 14 children go missing in New Delhi every day, at least six of whom are victims of human trafficking.

The United Nations Children's Fund says around 1.2 million children are victims of child trafficking across the world every year.

Traffick children like drugs

India's mega cities such as Delhi and Mumbai are a particular target for criminal gangs that police say traffick children in much the same way they sell drugs.

In August this year, the country's top court ordered the federal and state governments to provide data on 50,000 missing children after a petition blamed them for failing to solve the trafficking of children by organised gangs.

Police said they have rescued hundreds of children from factories and busted large-scale child prostitution rackets but they accept they are sometimes overwhelmed by the scale of the challenge.

The country's federal detectives admitted last year that there were 815 gangs comprising of more than 5,000 members involved in the kidnapping of children for prostitution and begging across India.

"Very often we find kidnapped children are forced to work as cheap labour in factories, shops and homes. They get exploited as sex slaves or are pushed into the child porn industry," Delhi police spokesman Rajan Bhagat said.

"These gangs target urban slum children because they can easily track their movement, lure them with food and kidnap them.

"Some poor parents are scared to even report the case to the police and most do not have photographs of their children to submit as evidence," he said.

In 2006, body parts of 17 children stuffed in plastic bags were found by the police in Nithari, a suburb near New Delhi, in a horrifying case that shocked the nation and triggered a raging debate on the safety of children in India.

Twelve-year-old Sharath Kumar knows better than most of such a danger.

The son of a shopkeeper in New Delhi, Sharath was nine when he became a kidnap target while waiting to be picked up from school by his mother.

"An old man covered my face with a black cloth, he dragged me and threatened that he would kill me if I raised an alarm," said Sharath.

The abduction was foiled when several youths heard Sharath crying out for help. They managed to rescue the youngster and reunite him with his mother.

"My son was just plain lucky. He was in a state of shock and cried for hours when he came home," said Sharath's mother, Madam Laxmi.

The incident taught Madam Laxmi a crucial lesson.

"When my son was kidnapped, the police demanded his latest photograph and I had nothing to offer," she said. She now gets portrait-sized photographs taken of her two boys every six months.

Investigators say the absence of photographic evidence makes it impossible for them to trace the children.

"Most kidnappers target children aged between six to 13. We cannot trace the children without photographs," said New Delhi senior police officer V. Renganathan.

He is the founder of an initiative called Pehchaan (Recognition) in which policemen take pictures of children in slum areas for their records and also provide copies to the youngsters' parents.

"The idea is to safeguard vulnerable children belonging to the poorer sections," he said.

For Madam Pinky, who provided pictures of her missing son to the police, the wait for news just goes on.

"Every morning I wake up only to wait for my son's return and I fall asleep waiting for him. Waiting is the only way of life for me."

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Last week October 29 was the birthday of Manilal Gandhi, Arun Gandhi’s late father and the second son of M.K. Gandhi.  Here is a brief look at Manilal’s own life and legacy drawn from a few select sources: Listen to a 1954 interview w/ Manilal Gandhi 

Manilal Mohandas Gandhi (28 October 1892 – 4 April 1956) was the second of four sons of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Kasturba Gandhi. Manilal was born in Rajkot, India. In 1897 Manilal traveled to South Africa for the first time, where he spent time working at the Phoenix Ashram near Durban. After a brief visit to India, in 1917 Manilal returned to South Africa to assist in printing the Indian Opinion a Gujarati-English weekly publication, at Phoenix, Durban.

By 1918, Manilal was doing most of the work for the press and took over in 1920 as editor. Like his father, Manilal was also sent to jail several times by the British colonial government after protesting against unjust laws. He remained editor until 1956, the year of his death. Manilal Gandhi, throughout his life, struggled against segregation and worked toward the 'New African' ideals of greater equality and harmony among races. Manilal Gandhi was an activist and the longest-serving editor of an influential newspaper, the Indian Opinion.

Fearlessly, he protested apartheid laws, even at the cost of prison sentences. Manilal Gandhi, for his dedication to modern ideals, deserves recognition in the New African Movement, the historical intervention and evolution of emerging African influence, independence and development through political, cultural and intellectual impact in the construction of modern African which began in the nation of South Africa in the late 1920s.

The definitive biography of Manilal Gandhi – Gandhi's Prisoner? The life of Gandhi's son Manilal - was written by his great granddaughter, Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie, a Professor of History at Western Cape University in South Africa.  Here she tells of her quest to write about Manilal, published in the Journal of Natal and Zulu History 2006 -

Read More – Interview With Ela Gandhi, Daughter Of Manilal Gandhi's Prisoner?  The Life Of Gandhi's Son Manilal By Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie Manilal Gandhi: a Hero in the New African Movement by Brandon Smith

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Hi Arun! Below is a link to the documentary I made featuring you called "A Quest for Peace: Nonviolence Among Religions"  I think it came out really well, and I can't wait to hear your feedback. Thanks so much for allowing us to interview you, and give us such amazing material to work with. You did such a great job in the interview, and in your talk later the evening. I am so grateful for the opportunity to meet you.      Thanks again, Matthew

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