Lausanne World Pulse – Dalit Education Centers: Delivering Emancipation and Building Leaders
By Joseph D’Souza
Susmita is now one benefactor of this tremendous opportunity for education. Today, thousands of children like her are in schools specifically created for Dalits. These schools are the method by which Dalit emancipation will be delivered in the new generation. They are building tomorrow’s Dalit leaders and are building a hope and a future for the Dalits that never before existed. Already fifty such schools are operating across the nation. The hope is to have a thousand in the next few years. All this is being done under the auspices of the Dalit Freedom Network (DFN). The DFN works in four areas of Dalit emancipation: education, human rights, medical care and economic enterprise. Each component is necessary to end the caste system stigma.
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Dalit Education Centers offer children of all ages and |
Why is an English Education so Important to the Dalits?
For three thousand years, Dalits have been denied access to education by the upper castes. Because they are uneducated, they cannot get jobs reserved for them in the Indian affirmative action/reservation system.
This also means that very rarely do any Dalits get an education in the English language, the language of the ruling elite in India. English education is private and expensive in India. And because Dalits cannot speak English, they have been denied right of entry to the globalization process which is impacting the world. The Dalits have been kept in ignorance, denied their rights and become victims of yet another injustice.
Many argue that India has changed and developed exponentially in the fifty years since independence from British rule. India will likely be another major superpower with its growth in economics, technology, medicine, engineering, bio-technology, nuclear power and sheer population numbers. Surely, these people say, this tremendous growth must have had a trickle-down effect on all parts of society, including those in the lower strata of the culture.
However, a closer look at India’s movers and shakers is eye-opening. By and large, those in the limelight are the elitist and educated upper caste, many of whom who are also fluent in English. These are the ones who have accessed English education over the last fifty years because they have had the financial capacity. They have also known that English is the language of global economics, medicine and the Internet.
The world sees the apparent commitment on the part of India’s leaders to economic, social and political growth. The deception, though, comes in the fact that India’s Dalits remain in oppression under the upper caste rulers. Access to an English-based world class education for the Dalits will mean the death of upper caste domination. Therefore, the upper castes seek to fool the world into believing that the entire nation is achieving new heights and is growing stronger. National marketing campaigns such as “India Shining” have no realistic bearing on the plight of the nation’s low caste and Dalits. India is not “shining” in the slums, in the villages that still apply extreme segregation or for the children who are bonded in labor to their upper caste landowners. It is estimated that forty to one hundred million children are in child labor in India, the vast majority from the low and oppressed castes.
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