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Shimla: As a child, <keyword id="23421532" type="General" weightage="100" keywordseo="Pinki-Haryan" source="keywords">Pinki Haryan</keyword>, along with her parents, begged on the streets and scavenged for food in garbage dumps in Mcleodganj. Twenty years and a Chinese medical degree later, she is now burning the midnight oil to clear an exam that will make her eligible to practice medicine in India. It was in 2004 when Lobsang Jamyang, a Tibetan refugee monk and the director of Dharamshala-based charitable trust, spotted Haryan begging. Days later, he visited the slum cluster at Charan Khud and recognised the girl. Then began the uphill task of convincing her parents, especially her father Kashmiri Lal, to let her pursue education. After hours of persuasion, Lal agreed. Haryan got admission into the Dayanand Public School at Dharamshala and was among the first batch of students at a hostel for destitute children set up by the charitable trust in 2004. Ajay Srivastava, president of NGO Umang Foundation, who has been associated with Jamyang for the last 19 years, said initially, Haryan missed her home and parents but kept her focus on studies, which she realised was her ticket out of poverty. Soon enough, the results were proof of her dedication. She passed the senior secondary examination and also cleared the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (Undergraduate). The NEET is an all-India entrance exam for admission to undergraduate medical courses, Srivastava said. However, the doors of private medical colleges remained shut for her due to the exorbitant fees. With the help of the <keyword id="23421533" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="Tong-Len-Charitable-Trust" source="keywords" meta.keywordsubtype="org" meta.entityname="Tong-Len Charitable Trust" meta.hostid="261" meta.entityid="Tong-Len Charitable Trust">Tong-Len Charitable Trust</keyword> in the United Kingdom, she got admission to a prestigious <keyword id="20110301" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="medical-college" source="keywords">medical college</keyword> in China in 2018 and has returned to Dharamshala recently after completing her MBBS course, Srivastava said. After a wait of 20 years, Haryan is a qualified doctor raring to serve the destitute and give them a better life. "Poverty was the biggest struggle since childhood. It was painful to see my family in distress. As I got into school, I had an ambition to become successful in life," Haryan told PTI. "As a child, I lived in a slum so my background was my biggest motivation. I wished for a good and financially stable life," she added. Sharing a childhood memory, Haryan recalled that during her school admission interview as a four-year-old, she expressed her ambition to become a doctor. "At that point in time, I had no idea what work a doctor does, but I always wanted to help my community," said Haryan who is preparing for the Foreign Medical Graduate Examination (FMGE) to become eligible to practice medicine in India. Haryan, whose brother and sister have enrolled in a school after drawing inspiration from her, credited Jamyang for her "slum-dweller to doctor" success story. "He (Jamyang) had a vision to help destitute and poor children. He was the biggest support system I had while I was in school. His belief in me was a big inspiration to do well," she said, adding that there were several others like her who have made it big in life due to the support from the trust. Meanwhile, Jamyang said he had set up the trust in the hope of imparting basic education to destitute children so that they can lead a respectful life. "I did not realise that these children were so full of talent... They have become role models and are inspiring others," he said. Srivastava said Jamyang believes that children should not be treated as "machines to earn money". Instead, he says that they should be encouraged to become good human beings. "He has dedicated his entire life to the children living in slums. Several of them, who once languished in the streets, were adopted by him and have today become engineers, doctors, and journalists," Srivastava said.

From seeking alms to prescribing balms: Journey of a child beggar from HP who became a doctor

India’s all set to becoming the world’s economic superpower, but there is another darker side that exists, which successive governments in India have not been able to eradicate from the land. Yes, we are talking about <keyword id="56851" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="20" keywordseo="Begging">begging</keyword>, a problem that India has been battling since time immemorial. The cultural aspect of begging has more shades than the economic ones. But, in the present context where India has been making strides in modern technology, begging is something that needs to be paid immediate attention to, and there are enough reasons to attend to it today than tomorrow. 
 <keyword id="2796945" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="20" keywordseo="begging-in-India">Begging in India</keyword> has reached mammoth proportions. A <keyword id="6391159" type="POSITION" weightage="20" keywordseo="beggar">beggar</keyword> woman with an ever sleeping child is a familiar sight in all metros. No sooner does the light turn red, tiny, soiled hands with empty expressions in their eyes seem to materialize from nowhere. As soon as the light turns green, they turn obscure probably never to be seen again. 
 
Children are more adept at begging than the elders. Could this have to do with the cultural aspect? The smaller the beggar is, more the alms that land on their tiny hands. In somewhat skewed manner, begging is what is threatening India’s march into the ‘good days’ ahead. Because, as is the universal truth: begging is moral corruption at its core. It is a major social problem of the 21st century. 
 
Children are kidnapped and maimed to suit the profession. Usually children younger than 3-4 years old are kidnapped from crowded places, trains or buses, or even hospitals to ensure their tracing becomes a challenge. 
 
According to an estimate, more than half a million beggars seem to be dotting the streets of cities that hand out alms to them. As far as the religious side is concerned, beggars are a regular feature near places of religious worship where people’s sense of philanthropy is high at any given point of time. 
 Experts may opine that beggary is a result of economic exclusion in the run up to the progress and development. Unplanned urbanization has contributed in a great way to beggary having increased in cities and metros. Causal factors could be under-employment, <keyword id="6358907" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="20" keywordseo="unemployment">unemployment</keyword> or poverty. 
 
But, there is more to begging than what meets the eye in India. Poverty is for real, make no mistake about it. In the modern world, where everything has a profit angle, begging too is not devoid from that. Most often, children who beg on streets and women who knock on the car window shields evoking a sense of pity and guilt to ensure they are given their share of a few rupees, hand over their earnings at the end of the day to their gang leader. A mafia is what keeps begging from disappearing with the advent of a social and economical solution. 
 
There are laws against begging in India. Despite their presence, begging remains a hugely profitable venture for mafia groups, which in turn work on more anti-social aspects creating and maintaining the existing inequality and crime. 
 
In more ways than one, begging makes economic sense for those involved in the activity. First, it does not demand any investment to begin with. It has no maintenance costs. A beggar can operate alone, and no one keeps a check on his earnings. One just has to look dirty, soiled and have a perpetual look of helplessness writ large on their face. This profession yields much more around places of worship, and around those areas which are regularly visited by tourists who are often overtaken by the striking poverty that shows on a beggar’s persona. 
 
There have been instances of beggars maintaining bank accounts with balance running into quite a few lakhs, which they would use to have a luxurious lifestyle. Though such instances are less, they are not fictitious. They do exist in real life. 
 
Legal framework describes begging as an activity that involves receiving alms at a public place, whether under the pretence of singing, dancing or some such activities. Kidnapping and maiming a minor for the purpose of begging is punishable under Indian Penal Code. Country is dotted with beggar rehabilitation centres, but somehow, all the steps taken through the years seem to have failed to address the problem at its core. 
 
In India, roughly 60,000 children disappear each year and majority of them turn up on streets as beggars. Those children, who beg, are under the watchful eyes of their mafia leaders, who are normally well-networked with police forces too. So, tracing a minor child is usually a herculean task for parents who have lost their child. Chances are that by the time they set out to look for their son or daughter, they (children) would have already been maimed beyond recognition. 
 
Eventually, these children end up being criminals, or drug addicts having taken the route to painless memory with their peers. So long as the network is not cracked, the alms-raking profession will continue to have patrons in various forms. 
 
Image: thinkstock

India, the emerging economic superpower, needs help to fight the begging menace

Someone utters the world ‘<a href="http://www.businessinsider.in/searchresult.cms?query=Slavery+">Slavery</a>’ and one can map a picture of starving men and women in torn clothes made to work recklessly, kept in dark gallows, chained and tortured by their ‘masters’. To us in this day and age, it is more like an issue from a bygone era. Or that it only exists in countries ravaged by war and <a href="http://www.businessinsider.in/searchresult.cms?query=poverty">poverty</a>. Even as such form of bonded labour has been abolished by the Indian law way back in 1976, yet it has manifested itself through the roots branching out to every corner of the Indian society today. It is what we call modern day slavery. 
 Pronouncing India as the 'World’s Slave Capital', the Global Slavery Index last year said that out of 35.8 million people living in <keyword id="1978296" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="100" keywordseo="modern-slavery">modern slavery</keyword> globally, Asia accounts for 23.5 million victims, and India alone accounts for 14.2 million people. You may want to know what is modern slavery? We say it’s something you and I are not a victim of, but our domestic help may be, a beggar on the street may be, women working in factories mostly are. To be clearer, a universally accepted definition of modern slavery is that it involves one person possessing or controlling another person in such as a way as to significantly deprive that person of their individual liberty, with the intention of exploiting that person through their use, management, profit, transfer or disposal. It occurs in brick kilns, carpet weaving, embroidery and other textile manufacturing, forced prostitution, agriculture, domestic servitude, mining, and organised begging rings to cite a few. 
 
The Index report sheds light on the immense challenges in India's modern slavery. “Across India's population of over 1.2 billion people, all forms of modern slavery, including inter-generational bonded labour, trafficking for <a href="http://www.businessinsider.in/searchresult.cms?query=sexual+exploitation">sexual exploitation</a> and forced marriage, exist. Evidence suggests that members of lower castes and tribes, religious minorities and migrant workers are disproportionately affected by modern slavery. <a href="http://www.businessinsider.in/searchresult.cms?query=Labour+">Labour </a>is particularly prevalent throughout India with families enslaved for generations." 
 
Moreover, there are reports of women and children from India being recruited with promises of non-existent jobs and later sold for sexual exploitation, or forced into sham marriages. In some religious groups, pre-pubescent girls are sold for sexual servitude in temples. Recent reports suggest that one child goes missing every eight minutes; it is feared that some are sold into forced begging, domestic work, and commercial sexual exploitation. 
 
Amid the dismal state of affair, there have been some ongoing efforts to tackle the situation in India: 
 
- In 2013, the government amended the Indian Penal code to include specific anti-trafficking provisions. 
-In 2014, the government expanded the number of police anti-human trafficking units across the country to 215 units, aiming to establish a unit in 650 districts. 
-The judiciary and over 20,000 law enforcement have received training on victim identification, the new legal framework, and victim-centered investigations. 
-NGOs and the civil society at large are actively involved in counseling, supporting and rescuing victims, often taking enormous risks. 
 
However, a lot needs to be done to curb the menace that plagues our society and threatens the freedom of our people. “Traffickers are motivated by high profits and the low risk due to weak law enforcement and low levels of prosecution. To tackle <a href="http://www.businessinsider.in/searchresult.cms?query=trafficking">human trafficking</a>, prosecution and punishment of offenders must be pursued as well as legal action to seize the assets and profits of traffickers," said the study by the Freedom Fund and Thomson Reuters Foundation. 
 
"While prosecutions alone will not bring an end to trafficking, there is immense potential to use legal strategies to deliver justice to victims, deter potential perpetrators and put traffickers out of business," it added. 
 
As the world observes International Day for Abolition of Slavery today, here are some pictures reflecting the disappointing state of slavery in India even 68 years after it came out of the clutches of the British rule: 
 
(Image credits: Reuters)

Shameful! India is the
‘World’s Slave Capital’

<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right click-to-enlarge"><div><div class="image on-image"><a title_source="Wikimedia, CC" title_caption="Theresa May has promised an investigation." class="zoomin" href="https://static-ssl.businessinsider.com/image/53bbc82669bedd356a5147be-960/640px-theresa_may_-_home_secretary_and_minister_for_women_and_equality.jpg"></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theresa_May#mediaviewer/File:Theresa_May_-_Home_Secretary_and_minister_for_women_and_equality.jpg">Wikimedia, CC</a>Theresa May has promised an investigation.</div></div></div>The British government has announced it will <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/jul/07/theresa-may-child-abuse-inquiry-investigate">conduct a series of investigations into allegations that as many as 20 senior British figures</a> - including politicians at cabinet level - were involved in, or turned a blind eye to, the sexual abuse of children, The Guardian reports.
Home Secretary Theresa May told the House of Commons there would be two main areas of inquiry: Who, exactly, within the governments of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s may have abused young boys who had been taken into care by social services? And why were <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/leon-brittan-faces-questions-on-pedophile-dossier-2014-7#ixzz36s0pV8Da">documents detailing those allegations lost by the Home Office</a> back in the 1980s?
Britain is already reeling from a series of pedophilia cases that came out of the BBC in recent years, in which huge TV celebrities like the DJ Jimmy Savile and the children's entertainer Rolf Harris have been revealed as serial child abusers.
Now, it's getting worse, according to Peter McKelvie, a child protection manager in the Hereford and Worcester area whose work has previously resulted in the conviction of pedophiles. <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-28203914">He told the BBC</a>:
Peter McKelvie, whose allegations led initially to a 2012 police inquiry, said a "powerful elite" of pedophiles carried out "the worst form" of abuse.
"I would say we are looking at upwards of 20 (people) and a much larger number of people who have known about it and done nothing about it, who were in a position to do something about it," he said.
Mr McKelvie said some of those who were alleged to have abused children had now died.
He told the BBC he had spoken to victims over "many, many years" and that children - "almost exclusively boys" - were moved around like "lumps of meat".
They had been subjected to the "worst form of abuse", including rape, he said.
It gets even worse than that. In the 1970s, the government appears to have funded with taxpayers' money a lobby group for child abusers, the "Pedophile Information Exchange" (PIE). <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10952296/Home-Office-funded-charities-linked-to-paedophile-group.html">The Telegraph reports</a>:
In the 1970s the Voluntary Services Unit, part of the Home Office, gave £65,750 to the Albany Trust, an organisation which provides counselling and support to lesbian, gay and transgender people.
According to the report, in December 1975 the Albany Trust invited members of PIE to a series of meetings about the need for a support group for paedophiles.
The meeting also recommended the publication of an information pamphlet about pedophilia targeted at professionals, parents and the general public.
The trust initially backed the pamphlet but withdrew its support after criticism by Mary Whitehouse, the [public morals] campaigner. The trust also arranged the translation of a Dutch government report calling for the age of consent to be lowered to 16.
A further £410,000 was given to the Princedale Trust between 1974 and 1984 to support Release, an charity which provides advice on drug use and laws. The charity shared the same address as PIE.
And, yes, there is still worse to come. <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10952138/Member-of-Edward-Heaths-government-boasted-he-could-cover-up-a-scandal-involving-small-boys.html">The Telegraph reports that a former Conservative MP told the BBC</a> back in 1995 that the party would help cover-up for members of parliament who had been caught committing acts "involving small boys" in return for their political cooperation on legislation they might otherwise have challenged:
"It might be debt, it might be… a scandal involving small boys, or any kind of scandal in which, erm er, a member seemed likely to be mixed up in, they'd come and ask if we could help and if we could, we did."
A lot of very important people within the British ruling class are now going to be very, very afraid. Here's who McKelvie says he believes will be affected by the investigations, <a href="http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/uk/crime/article4141767.ece">per the Times</a>:
"We are looking at the Lords, we are looking at the Commons, we are looking at the judiciary, we are looking at all institutions where there will be a small percentage of paedophiles and a slightly larger percentage of people who have known about it but have felt that in terms of their own self-interest and self-preservation and for political party reasons it's been safer for them to cover it up rather than deal with it.
One lone voice is calling for calm. There is something of a witchhunt tone in British political life right now, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/07/no-home-office-cover-up-over-geoffrey-dickens-dossier">according to former treasury secretary David Mellor</a>:
Quite how this innocuous tale became the scandalous allegations and innuendos we have been hearing in recent days beggars belief. There is no evidence whatsoever that [MP Geoffrey Dickens, who prepared a dossier on child abusers among U.K. politicians which was lost in the early 1980s] was remotely dismayed by the way his dossier was treated, so why are so many other people anxious to be more Catholic than the Pope?

There's Going To Be A Massive Investigation Into Senior British Politicians Over Alleged Child Abuse

<ul class="summary-list"><li>Shoji Morimoto started a "rental person" service in 2018, where he's hired to do absolutely nothing.</li><li>The introvert said the job gave him a "similar kind of passive entertainment" as watching TV.</li></ul><a target="_blank" href="https://twitter.com/morimotoshoji">Shoji Morimoto</a> has an interesting occupation: He <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/japanese-man-shoji-morimoto-do-nothing-rent-a-man-chitchat-2022-1">rents himself out to clients who want him to do absolutely nothing</a>.Morimoto, who began his "rental person" service in 2018, said he'd been hired more than 4,000 times. His assignments have varied from the banal to the bizarre.Once, a woman asked Morimoto to watch her search for a husband on matchmaking sites. He recounted the gig in his memoir, "<a target="_blank" href="https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/128183600">Rental Person Who Does Nothing</a>," a translation of which hit bookstores in the US <a target="_blank" href="https://www.harpercollins.com/products/rental-person-who-does-nothing-shoji-morimoto?variant=41046832840738">on January 9</a>."She screamed (like in her DM) every 10 minutes or so. At one stage, she made a mistake with an app, clicking 'Like' for a man she wanted to skip through. She stared up at the ceiling and looked very upset," Morimoto wrote."I had a great afternoon tea and really enjoyed myself," he added.Morimoto said in his memoir that he once accompanied a client to file their divorce papers. He was also hired to bid someone farewell at a railway station and once waited for a client at a marathon finishing line."It's like watching TV. A lot of people find TV boring, but I like it," Morimoto said in his memoir."Do-nothing Rental gives me a similar kind of passive entertainment, even though, in this case, I'm the service provider rather than the service user," he said.That said, there are certain assignments he wouldn't accept.Morimoto, who is married with a child, once turned down a client who asked to have sex with him."I've turned down a number of requests to go to pop concerts too," he wrote. "I don't know much about music, and most of the concerts I've been asked to go along to have been by artists I've never heard of."He added: "At first, I thought it might be fun, but it wasn't really — if you're not interested, you're not interested."Morimoto believes the job is a great fit for his introverted personality."The client wants to do something, and I just go along. No deep commitment is expected and no personality required," he wrote in his memoir."It's funny that someone like Rental Person should be in demand. I suppose you could say my lack of individuality has become my 'product,'" he said.His eccentric calling has earned him criticism. He said people had called him "a new-age gigolo" or "a new-age beggar." But Morimoto doesn't feel offended by those labels."I think being a gigolo or beggar are potential ways of relating to people, and the word 'new' sounds good, so I feel quite positive about these comments," he wrote in his memoir.Morimoto used to charge 10,000 Japanese yen, or about $68, per booking, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/oddly-enough/dream-job-japanese-man-who-gets-paid-do-nothing-2022-09-06/">Reuters</a> reported in September 2022.In September, he said he <a target="_blank" href="https://twitter.com/morimotoshoji/status/1698705759004205559">no longer charged his clients</a> and would just accept reimbursement for travel expenses and the food and drink consumed during the session."At the moment, I'm living on savings. What I do isn't really a business. Maybe it's best to think of it as something I'm doing for fun (like a trip abroad I've saved up for)," he wrote on X.

A Japanese man who made a living from letting people rent him to do absolutely nothing says he now does it for fun

The incredible oblivion of Judge Marvin Isgur

<ul><li>Several poor families have lost their livelihoods during this pandemic, <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-52210888">leaving at least 115 </a>million <keyword id="6354493" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="20" keywordseo="children">children</keyword> at the risk of <keyword id="6378239" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="20" keywordseo="malnutrition">malnutrition</keyword>. </li><li>However, according to Economist Mohan Guruswamy, the decline in the next quarter is<a href="https://twitter.com/fayedsouza/status/1300487337739055104"> going to be horrendous.</a> </li><li>Experts say while we control <keyword id="8763838" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="20" keywordseo="covid-19">COVID-19</keyword>, we should not forget the development of other health issues and should continue to <a href="https://www.indiaspend.com/malnutrition-causes-68-of-under-5-deaths-in-india/">pay attention to them as well. </a> </li></ul>In India, the <keyword id="1754604" type="PERSON" weightage="20" keywordseo="coronavirus">coronavirus</keyword> pandemic forced tens of thousands of children to go to sleep on an empty stomach. Several poor families lost their livelihoods, <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-52210888">leaving at least 115 </a>million children at the risk of malnutrition. And, the latest GDP number isn’t comforting. Economists believe India’s worsening economy — <a href="https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/indicators/gdp-growth-at-23-9-in-q1-worst-economic-contraction-on-record/articleshow/77851891.cms">which saw a -23.9% dip in GDP in three months</a> — is going to push more people under poverty and is also going to affect the country’s progress in reducing malnutrition. "What will happen is more people will lose jobs, and they'll lose hope. Hunger will increase, child malnutrition will increase, and more people will be pushed into poverty." Santosh Mehrotra, Professor of Economics and Chairperson, Centre for Informal Sector and Labour Studies, <a href="https://twitter.com/fayedsouza/status/1300491428003364864">JNU said in an interview</a>. Prof Mehrotra believes the economy will shrink further and which will reduce daily wages in rural areas. People will come to urban cities to find work, but due to a lack of jobs in the market, we will see a lot more beggars on the streets. However, according to Mohan Guruswamy, the decline hasn’t begun yet and the decline in the next quarter is<a href="https://twitter.com/fayedsouza/status/1300487337739055104"> going to be horrendous.</a> Guruswamy heads the Centre for Policy Alternative and has worked as an adviser to the Finance Ministry in 1998. COVID-19 brings India’s little progress to a halt Over the last few years, India was able to make a little progress in its fight against malnutrition, with a significant decline in child mortality rate. Between 2000 and 2017, India’s under-5 mortality rate (USMR) declined by 49% from 83 deaths per 1000 live births in 2000 to 42 deaths in 2017. There were 1.04 million under-five deaths in 2017, against 2.24 million in 2000, <a href="https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736%2820%2930471-2">according to the latest research published in the Lancet. </a> The mortality data becomes a crucial indicator as <a href="https://www.indiaspend.com/malnutrition-causes-68-of-under-5-deaths-in-india/"> 68% of under-five deaths in India are due t</a>o inaccessible proper meals or maternal and child malnutrition. If this progress were to continue, India would have met its Sustainable Goal of reducing under-five mortality to reduce to 25% by 2030. However, the progress came to a halt after the COVID-19 lockdown forced millions of children to stay out of school. For thousands of children in rural areas, this also means they won’t be able to get <a href="https://www.indiaspend.com/malnutrition-could-cost-childrens-health-lives-for-years-after-covid-crisis-experts-warn/">food under the Mid-Day meal programme.</a> The World Health Organisation <a href="http://www.emro.who.int/nutrition/nutrition-infocus/feeding-babies-and-young-children-during-the-covid-19-outbreak.htmles,%20protein%20and%20milk">advised </a>people to give fresh fruits, vegetables, legumes, protein, and milk to young children and infants during the pandemic. But, migrant labourers and other poor families could not afford to buy fruits and milk every day. Even getting by with a decent meal everyday was becoming a struggle. “I can only give them what I can afford,” a worker<a href="https://www.indiaspend.com/malnutrition-could-cost-childrens-health-lives-for-years-after-covid-crisis-experts-warn/"> told IndiaSpend. </a> Malnutrition perpetuates the vicious cycle of intergenerational undernutrition that results in a high incidence of babies born with low birth weight, more susceptible to infections, more likely to experience growth failure, reflected in high levels of child undernutrition and anaemia, Dr. Sunil Rajpal, Associate Professor, Health Economist, IIHMR University, Jaipur told Business Insider India. Experts say while we control COVID-19, we should not forget the development of other health issues and should continue to <a href="https://www.indiaspend.com/malnutrition-causes-68-of-under-5-deaths-in-india/">pay attention to them as well. </a> SEE ALSO: <a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/enterprise/news/rise-in-work-from-anywhere-will-lead-to-more-outsourcing-thats-an-opportunity-for-tcs-infosys-and-hcl-tech/articleshow/77864248.cms">Rise in 'work from anywhere' will lead to more outsourcing — that's an opportunity for TCS, Infosys and HCL Tech</a> <a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/retail/news/ambani-vs-damani-indias-635-billion-retail-ring-will-see-the-countrys-two-richest-men-battle-with-different-strategies/articleshow/77846555.cms">Ambani vs Damani ⁠— India’s $635 billion retail ring will see the country’s two richest men⁠ battle with different strategies</a>

COVID-19 has added a layer to malnutrition crisis in India

Noida resident <keyword id="3087061" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="100" keywordseo="Vikas-Sharda">Vikas Sharda</keyword> who clicked 13-year-old Harendra's picture that's all over the internet, says: "He was not begging, neither was he nagging people to use the weighing machine he had. I sensed a self respect the boy has. I felt respect for him, not sympathy." 
 
The gentleman who takes the metro from Noida City Centre everyday used to see Harendra glued to textbooks solving Maths problems and writing in English. Something compelled him to talk to the little boy only to learn about his hardships. 
 
Somewhat inspired by his spirit, Vikas posted the boy’s picture on Facebook recently that has become an instant hit on social media. 
 
This is what his post read: “I want you people who travel from Noida metro after 7 pm to use his services and somehow help him get back to studies. And PLEASE don't make him feel like a beggar..” read Sharda’s Facebook post. 
 
It was more like an appeal to people to help the boy than pity him. "I just wanted people to use his weighing machine so that he would get more money that he could use for studies," he says. 
 
WHAT’S HARENDRA’S STORY? 
 Born in a poor family, <keyword id="3087062" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="100" keywordseo="Harendra-Chauhan">Harendra Chauhan</keyword>, hails from Hoshiyarpur village. He is a student of class IX. Such is his passion for academics that after school hours, he would sit outside a metro station with a weighing machine to earn a few bucks. Usually one could find him glued to his textbooks amid the hustle bustle outside the metro exit. 
 
It was because his father cannot walk. He wanted to earn money to support his dad who has a private job, in making ends meet, he tells us. 
 
“I used to sit here for my father. The economic condition of my family is not good. We don’t have money," he says. 
 But Harendra has got a fresh lease of life now. He doesn’t sit there anymore after Vikas’ viral post on the boy caught the attention of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister <keyword id="6355031" type="PERSON" weightage="100" keywordseo="Akhilesh-Yadav">Akhilesh Yadav</keyword>. 
 The Chief Minister, moved by the dedication and passion of this boy, offered to support his <keyword id="6355445" type="COMPANY" weightage="100" keywordseo="Education">education</keyword> by felicitating him with a cheque of Rs. 5 lakh, during a special event at his residence to reward the people whose struggles were highlighted by social media. 
 
The Rs 5 lakh amount will be kept in a fixed deposit and the interest from it will be further utilized for the child's education. 
 
When we asked Harendra about becoming a hero on social media, he had a clueless expression on his face. 
 
Trying to find the right words, he said,“ I am just happy to receive the money. With the money I can study ahead and ensure a better life for my family." 
 
He wants to join the army one day.

The real story behind Harendra Chauhan, the boy who's images of studying under a street lamp at a Metro station went viral

<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image">Pencils of PromiseAdam Braun, founder of Pencils of Promise</div></div></div>Nine years ago, Adam Braun was backpacking through India when he asked a child beggar what he wanted most in the world. The boy's reply: a pencil.
The answer stuck with Braun. The boy, he learned, had never been to school - like the 67 million kids around the world without a chance at an education. 
With that experience rattling around in his head, Braun returned home to the U.S., graduated from Brown University, and nabbed a job at the consulting firm Bain &amp; Company. He figured he'd spend a few decades establishing financial security and then pursue his social impact dreams. But while the corporate gig gave him prestige, stability, and a hefty paycheck, he couldn't shake the idealistic urge. 
So in October 2008, he founded Pencils of Promise, an education nonprofit that's now built more than 200 schools across the globe. While it started as a side project, he soon left Bain to pursue the venture full time. Since then, Braun has become something of a darling in the world of social good: Forbes <a href="http://www.forbes.com/pictures/lml45mkil/adam-braun-29-founder-and-ceo-pencils-of-promise/" target="_blank">named him to its 30-under-30 list</a>, Justin Bieber <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/29/justin-bieber-shoes-guatemala_n_4174498.html" target="_blank">has taken up the cause</a>, and his new book, "<a href="The%20Promise%20of%20a%20Pencil" target="_blank">The Promise Of A Pencil</a>," has endorsements from Richard Branson, Cory Booker, and Deepak Chopra. 
In less than six years, Braun has grown the organization's reach to 20,000 students in four countries and scaled the staff to 80 employees. The rapid growth has required building an infrastructure that emphasizes training and grooms potential leaders - since, after all, Braun can't do it all on his own. 
"After we built one school, I realized that other people were interested," he says. "It went from being a personal project to an organization - so all the skills from Bain were going to be used in building a great organization." 
Braun, 30, says one of the most important lessons he's learned so far is the power of stepping away, something he picked up in his consulting days. At Bain, he saw how new hires received dedicated training so that they could become as good as their bosses, if not better. Cultivating those competencies early allowed the boss to move from consultant to manager, manager to partner. 
<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image">From the author</div></div></div>
"A lot of founders have this belief that they're the only ones that can do a certain job as well as they believe it needs to be done," he says. That way of thinking gets in the way of growth, because "an infrastructure is primarily dependent, in my opinion, on a combination of talent and then investment of higher level leadership in training and fostering and cultivating that talent." 
That understanding carried over when Braun was ready to make his first in-country hire.
"I was riding my bike around Laos and visiting these villages, and I realized on my probably third or fourth visit that I really needed a Lao local, someone who's on the ground, speaks the language, to be the point person to oversee all of our work," he says. "The person that I trusted most and that I also saw greater potential in was a woman named Lanoy, who was in her late 20s and worked at the guesthouse where I stayed when I was traveling."
Although she spoke great English, <a href="http://www.pencilsofpromise.org/about-us/about-lanoy-keosuvan">Lanoy Keosuvan</a> had no formal business training. Her job was to change the sheets, clean the dishes, and take care of the guesthouse. But Braun saw potential in her, and he asked her to be the organization's first volunteer coordinator. 
Braun carefully trained her. They opened up an email account together. He walked her through sending her first email. He taught her how to build PowerPoint presentations, how to use Google Apps, and how to manage a team. 
It paid off. Today, Keosuvan is now the country manager for Laos, leading a 40-person staff across multiple regions. When the U.S. ambassador Dan Clune comes to Laos, he visits with Keosuvan. 
"We were a startup, underfunded to begin with," Braun says. "But as that startup really starts to grow, employees' responsibilities grow in relation to the growth of the organization." 
And that's why Braun is dedicated to the power of education - of both his students and his team.

How This Education Entrepreneur Learned To Scale Idealism

'Do you want to divide Europe?' Hungary's provocative prime minister discusses Europe's refugee crisis

<div class="KonaFilter image-container float_right"><div class="image on-image"></div></div>Paul Haggis was twenty-one years old in 1975.He was walking toward a record store in downtown London when he encountered a fast-talking, long-haired young man with piercing eyes standing on the corner of Dundas and Waterloo Streets. There was something keen and strangely adamant in his manner.His name was Jim Logan. He pressed a book into Haggis's hands. "You have a mind," Logan said. "This is the owner's manual." Then he demanded, "Give me two dollars."The book was Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, by L. Ron Hubbard, which was published in 1950. By the time Logan pushed it on Haggis, the book had sold more than two million copies throughout the world. Haggis opened the book and saw a page stamped with the words "Church of Scientology.""Take me there," he said to Logan.At the time, there were only a handful of Scientologists in the entire province of Ontario. By coincidence, Haggis had heard about the organization a couple of months earlier, from a friend who had called it a cult. That interested Haggis; he considered the possibility of doing a documentary ?lm about it.When he arrived at the church's quarters in London, it certainly didn't look like a cult-two young men occupying a hole-in-the-wall office above Woolworth's ?ve-and-dime.As an atheist, Haggis was wary of being dragged into a formal belief system. In response to his skepticism, Logan showed him a passage by Hubbard that read: "What is true is what is true for you. No one has any right to force data on you and command you to believe it or else."If it is not true for you, it isn't true. Think your own way through things, accept what is true for you, discard the rest. There is nothing unhappier than one who tries to live in a chaos of lies." These words resonated with Haggis.Although he didn't realize it, Haggis was being drawn into the church through a classic, four-step "dissemination drill" that recruiters are carefully trained to follow. The first step is to make contact, as Jim Logan did with Haggis in 1975.<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"></div></div></div>The second step is to disarm any antagonism the individual may display toward Scientology. Once that's done, the task is to "find the ruin"-that is, the problem most on the mind of the potential recruit. For Paul, it was a turbulent romance.The fourth step is to convince the subject that Scientology has the answer. "Once the person is aware of the ruin, you bring about an understanding that Scientology can handle the condition," Hubbard writes. "It's at the right moment on this step that one . . . directs him to the service that will best handle what he needs handled." At that point, the potential recruit has officially been transformed into a Scientologist.Paul responded to every step in an almost ideal manner. He and his girlfriend took a course together and, shortly thereafter, became Hubbard Qualified Scientologists, one of the first levels in what the church calls the Bridge to Total Freedom.Haggis was born in 1953, the oldest of three children. His father, Ted, ran a construction company specializing in roadwork-mostly laying asphalt and pouring sidewalks, curbs, and gutters. He called his company Global, because he was serving both London and Paris- another Ontario community fifty miles to the east.As Ted was getting his business started, the family lived in a small house in the predominantly white town. The Haggises were one of the few Catholic families in a Protestant neighborhood, which led to occasional confrontations, including a schoolyard fistfight that left Paul with a broken nose.Although he didn't really think of himself as religious, he identified with being a minority; however, his mother, Mary, insisted on sending Paul and his two younger sisters, Kathy and Jo, to Mass every Sunday. One day, she spotted their priest driving an expensive car.<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"></div></div></div>"God wants me to have a Cadillac," the priest explained. Mary responded, "Then God doesn't want us in your church anymore." Paul admired his mother's stand; he knew how much her religion meant to her. After that, the family stopped going to Mass, but the children continued in Catholic schools.Ted's construction business prospered to the point that he was able to buy a much larger house on eighteen acres of rolling land outside of town. There were a couple of horses in the stable, a Chrysler station wagon in the garage, and giant construction vehicles parked in the yard, like grazing dinosaurs.Paul spent a lot of time alone. He could walk the mile to catch the school bus and not see anyone along the way. His chores were to clean the horse stalls and the dog runs (Ted raised spaniels for ?eld trials). At home, Paul made himself the center of attention-"the apple of his mother's eye," his father recalled-but he was mischievous and full of pranks. "He got the strap when he was five years old," Ted said.When Paul was about thirteen, he was taken to say farewell to his grandfather on his deathbed. The old man had been a janitor in a bowling alley, having fled England because of some mysterious scandal.He seemed to recognize a similar dangerous quality in Paul. His parting words to him were, "I've wasted my life. Don't waste yours."<div class="KonaFilter image-container"><div class="image on-image"></div></div>In high school, Paul began steering toward trouble. His worried parents sent him to Ridley College, a boarding school in St. Catharines, Ontario, near Niagara Falls, where he was required to be a part of the cadet corps of the Royal Canadian Army. He despised marching or any regulated behavior, and soon began skipping the compulsory drills.He would sit in his room reading Ramparts, the radical magazine that chronicled the social revolutions then unfolding in America, where he longed to be. He was constantly getting punished for his infractions, until he taught himself to pick locks; then he could sneak into the prefect's office and mark off his demerits. The experience sharpened an incipient talent for subversion.After a year of this, his parents transferred him to a progressive boys' school, called Muskoka Lakes College, in northern Ontario, where there was very little system to subvert. Although it was called a college, it was basically a preparatory school. Students were encouraged to study whatever they wanted. Paul discovered a mentor in his art teacher, Max Allen, who was gay and politically radical. Allen produced a show for the Canadian Broadcasting Company called As It Happens.In 1973, while the Watergate hearings were going on in Washington, DC, Allen let Paul sit beside him in his cubicle at CBC while he edited John Dean's testimony for broadcast. Later, Allen opened a small theater in Toronto to show movies that had been banned under Ontario's draconian censorship laws, and Paul volunteered at the box office. They showed Ken Russell's The Devils and Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris. In Ted's mind, his son was working in a porno theater. "I just shut my eyes," Ted said.Paul left school after he was caught forging a check. He attended art school brie?y, and took some ?lm classes at a community college, but he dropped out of that as well. He grew his curly blond hair to his shoulders. He began working in construction full-time for Ted, but he was drifting toward a precipice. In the 1970s, London acquired the nickname "Speed City," because of the methamphetamine labs that sprang up to serve its blossoming underworld. Hard drugs were easy to obtain. Two of Haggis's friends died from overdoses, and he had a gun pointed in his face a couple of times. "I was a bad kid," he admitted. "I didn't kill anybody. Not that I didn't try."He also acted as a stage manager in the ninety-nine-seat theater his father created in an abandoned church for one of his stagestruck daughters. On Saturday nights, Paul would strike the set of whatever show was under way and put up a movie screen. In that way he introduced himself and the small community of ?lm buffs in London to the works of Bergman, Hitchcock, and the French New Wave.<div class="KonaFilter image-container"><div class="image on-image"></div></div>He was so affected by Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow- Up that in 1974 he decided to become a fashion photographer in England, like the hero of that movie. That lasted less than a year, but when he returned he still carried a Leica over his shoulder.Back in London, Ontario, he fell in love with a nursing student named Diane Gettas. They began sharing a one-bedroom apartment filled with Paul's books on ?lm.He thought of himself then as "a loner and an artist and an iconoclast." His grades were too poor to get into college. He could see that he was going nowhere. He was ready to change, but he wasn't sure how.Such was Paul Haggis's state of mind when he joined the Church of Scientology.Like every scientologist, when Haggis entered the church, he took his first steps into the mind of L. Ron Hubbard. He read about Hubbard's adventurous life: how he wandered the world, led dangerous expeditions, and healed himself of crippling war injuries through the techniques that he developed into Dianetics. He was not a prophet, like Mohammed, or divine, like Jesus. He had not been visited by an angel bearing tablets of revelation, like Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism. Scientologists believe that Hubbard discovered the existential truths that form their doctrine through extensive research-in that way, it is "science."The apparent rationalism appealed to Haggis. He had long since walked away from the religion of his upbringing, but he was still looking for a way to express his idealism. It was important to him that Scientology didn't demand belief in a god. But the figure of L. Ron Hubbard did hover over the religion in suggestive ways. He wasn't worshipped, exactly, but his visage and name were everywhere, like the absolute ruler of a small kingdom.There seemed to be two Hubbards within the church: the godlike authority whose every word was regarded as scripture, and the avuncular figure that Haggis saw on the training videos, who came across as wry and self-deprecating. Those were qualities that Haggis shared to a marked degree, and they inspired trust in the man he had come to accept as his spiritual guide.<div class="KonaFilter image-container"><div class="image on-image"></div></div>Still, Haggis felt a little stranded by the lack of irony among his fellow Scientologists. Their inability to laugh at themselves seemed at odds with the character of Hubbard himself. He didn't seem self-important or pious; he was like the dashing, wisecracking hero of a B movie who had seen everything and somehow had it all figured out. When Haggis experienced doubts about the religion, he reflected on the 16 mm films of Hubbard's lectures from the 1950s and 1960s, which were part of the church's indoctrination process. Hubbard was always chuckling to himself, marveling over some random observation that had just occurred to him, with a little wink to the audience suggesting that they not take him too seriously.He would just open his mouth and a mob of new thoughts would burst forth, elbowing each other in the race to make themselves known to the world. They were often trivial and disjointed but also full of obscure, learned references and charged with a sense of originality and purpose. "You walked in one day and you said, 'I'm a seneschal,' " Hubbard observed in a characteristic aside:"And this knight with eight-inch spurs, standing there-humph- and say, 'I'm supposed to open the doors to this castle, I've been doing this for a long time, and I'm a very trusted retainer'. . . He's insisting he's the seneschal but nobody will pay him his wages, and so forth. . . . He was somebody before he became the seneschal.Now, as a seneschal, he became nobody-until he finally went out and got a begging pan on the highway and began to hold it out for fish and chips as people came along, you know. . . . Now he says, 'I am something, I am a beggar,' but that's still something. Then the New York state police come along, or somebody, and they say to him-I'm a little mixed up in my periods here, but they say to him-'Do you realize you cannot beg upon the public road without license Number 603-F?' . . . So he starves to death and kicks the bucket and there he lies. . . . Now he's somebody, he's a corpse, but he's not dead, he's merely a corpse. . . . Got the idea? But he goes through sequences of becoming nobody, somebody, nobody, somebody, nobody, somebody, nobody, not necessarily on a dwindling spiral.Some people get up to the point of being a happy man. You know the old story of a happy man-I won't tell it-he didn't have a shirt. . . ."Just as this fuzzy parable begins to ramble into incoherence, Hubbard comes to the point, which is that a being is not his occupation or even the body he presently inhabits. The central insight of Scientology is that the being is eternal, what Hubbard terms a "thetan." "This chap, in other words, was somebody until he began to identify his beingness with a thing. . . . None of these beingnesses are the person. The person is the thetan."<div class="KonaFilter image-container"><div class="image on-image"></div></div>"He had this amazing buoyancy," Haggis recalled. "He had a deadpan sense of humor and this sense of himself that seemed to say, 'Yes, I am fully aware that I might be mad, but I also might be on to something.' "The zealotry that empowered so many members of the church came from the belief that they were the vanguard of the struggle to save humanity. "A civilization without insanity, without criminals and without war, where the able can prosper and honest beings can have rights, and where Man is free to rise to greater heights, are the aims of Scientology," Hubbard writes. Those breathless aims drew young idealists, like Haggis, to the church's banner.To advance such lofty goals, Hubbard developed a "technology" to attain spiritual freedom and discover oneself as an immortal being. "Scientology works 100 percent of the time when it is properly applied to a person who sincerely desires to improve his life," a church publication declares. This guarantee rests on the assumption that through rigorous research, Hubbard had uncovered a perfect understanding of human nature. One must not stray from the path he has laid down or question his methods.Scientology is exact. Scientology is certain. Step by step one can ascend toward clarity and power, becoming more oneself-but, paradoxically, also more like Hubbard. Scientology is the geography of his mind. Perhaps no individual in history has taken such copious internal soundings and described with so much logic and minute detail the inner workings of his own mentality.The method Hubbard put forward created a road map toward his own ideal self. Hubbard's habits, his imagination, his goals and wishes-his character, in other words-became both the basis and the destination of Scientology.<div class="KonaFilter image-container"><div class="image on-image"></div></div>Secretly, Haggis didn't really respect Hubbard as a writer. He hadn't been able to get through Dianetics, for instance. He read about thirty pages, then put it down. Much of the Scientology coursework, however, gave him a feeling of accomplishment. In 1976, he traveled to Los Angeles, the center of the Scientology universe, checking in at the old Château Élysée, on Franklin Avenue.Clark Gable and Katharine Hepburn had once stayed there, along with many other stars, but when Haggis arrived it was a run-down church retreat called the Manor Hotel. (It has since been spectacularly renovated and turned into Scientology's premier Celebrity Centre.) He had a little apartment with a kitchen where he could write.There were about 30,000 Scientologists in America at the time. Most of them were white, urban, and middle class; they were predominantly in their twenties, and many of them, especially in Los Angeles, were involved in graphic or performing arts. In other words, they were a lot like Paul Haggis.He immediately became a part of a community in a city that can otherwise be quite isolating. For the first time in his life, he experienced a feeling of kinship and camaraderie with people who had a lot in common-"all these atheists looking for something to believe in, and all these wanderers looking for a club to join."In 1977, Haggis returned to Canada to continue working for his father, who could see that his son was struggling. Ted Haggis asked him what he wanted to do with his life. Haggis said he wanted to be a writer. His father said, "Well, there are only two places to do that, New York and Los Angeles. Pick one, and I'll keep you on the payroll for a year." Paul chose LA because it was the heart of the ? lm world.Soon after this conversation with his father, Haggis and Diane Gettas got married. Two months later, they loaded up his brown Ranchero and drove to Los Angeles, moving into an apartment with Diane's brother, Gregg, and three other people. Paul got a job moving furniture. On the weekends he took photographs for yearbooks. At night he wrote scripts on spec at a secondhand drafting table. The following year, Diane gave birth to their first child, Alissa. Excerpted from <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307745309/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0307745309&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=thebusiinsi-20&amp;linkId=THW4VIR5KGK2QVWP">Going Clear</a> by Lawrence Wright. Copyright © 2013 by Lawrence Wright. Excerpted by permission of Vintage, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

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