It is a given for any nation to be highly literate in order to grow. Pockets or clusters of literacy will surely not help in a big way. Instead every nation must strive towards providing basic education to all. In fact it is the birth right of every citizen of the country.
But, we cannot expect this from countries that are poor & rightly classified as the developing or under-developed nations. The governments in such countries will never be able to single handedly achieve the goal of 100% literacy.
India has close to 260 million children. That's around 25% of the population. Only a fraction of this receives quality education. Most of the children do not receive even the basic level of education which costs just $25. But, the government is unable to do much due to a lack of funds, apart from numerous other reasons like corruption etc.
While it is not plausible to think of weeding out corruption, we, as software engineers, can certainly help monetarily. As responsible citizens and the 'haves' of the nation, we must take it upon ourselves to convert the 'have-nots' to 'haves'.
India has around 700,000 software engineers. Let's take a conservative estimate and say that on an average everyone earns Rs.12000 (or $250) every month. If each one of these decides to spend $25 or Rs.1200 (10% of his salary, which is what it takes to provide basic healthcare & education for a child in India for a year!!) once in two months, then the number of children he/she would have adopted would be 6 per year.
Just imagine:
700,000 x 6 = 4.2 million children are being taken care of every year, just by the software engineers of India.
And what is the saving for the government ?
700,000 x Rs.1200 = Rs.840,000,000 (Rs.84 crores!!) or 700,000 x $25 = $17,500,000.
Remember, only software engineers have contributed till now. Moreover, some affluent ones can pitch in with more funds. Add to this, the fact that, had it been left to the government, a major portion of the same would have been siphoned off by the middlemen! Not a single coin is lost if we directly provide it to the NGOs.
Tomorrow, even if 10% of the children who have been educated this way go on to become scientists and business leaders, we would have done our duty.
Just Think. That's the Power of Giving.
Some top NGOs :
www.cry.org
www.giveindia.org
