Alleviating Poverty in the World’s Largest Democracy

August 04, 2022

Urmila is a 7th grader at the Sevaron-ki-Dhani Government Upper Primary School in the state of Rajasthan in India. Like many children in rural India, she is the first person in her family to get a formal education, and she dreams of having a career one day.

Most of the children from Urmila’s village face the same problem she did: her parents are just two of approximately 139 million people in India who migrate every year from impoverished rural villages in search of work.

For their children, the difficulties inherent in these migrations are compounded by the lack of education at remote worksites and the harsh reality that they might have to work alongside their parents to help support their families.

This is where the American India Foundation (AIF) has made a difference. AIF is a nonprofit organization devoted to improving the lives of underprivileged individuals through high-impact interventions in health, education, livelihood, and leadership. One such intervention is AIF’s Learning and Migration Program (LAMP), which has provided 940,566 children like Urmila with the formal education they need to break the cycle of poverty.

AIF’s Roots

In 2001, India suffered vast devastation from the Gujarat earthquake. As the scale of the destruction drew international attention, President Bill Clinton and Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee recognized the need for a philanthropic bridge between the world’s two largest democracies, which would provide mutually beneficial support for India’s economic and democratic growth. Thus AIF was founded.

With a population of roughly 1.3 billion people from a diverse set of backgrounds, India is by far the world’s largest democracy. But, according to the World Bank, much of the population in India — around 659 million people — still lives on less than $3.20 per day. Since growing out of the massive recovery effort following the Gujarat earthquake, AIF has remained at the forefront of the fight against poverty in India.

Healthcare

One of AIF’s most noteworthy healthcare programs is the Maternal and Newborn Survival Initiative (MANSI). Because many women living in rural villages would have to make arduous and sometimes dangerous journeys to find medical facilities for childbirth, AIF instituted MANSI to provide the resources and support for local communities to assist mothers with home deliveries. So far MANSI is responsible for the treatment of over 188,909 newborns. Sometimes, things as simple as distributing iron supplements to undernourished mothers can prevent premature births and substantially reduce the risk of infant mortality.

Education

Beyond their work through LAMP, AIF has funded and helped organize schooling for millions of children. The Digital Equalizer program has empowered over 5,424,571 students with interactive STEM education. In accordance with its focus on underprivileged women and children, AIF also instituted its STEM for girls of India program (SFGI), which not only teaches girls how to use technologies but also gives them opportunities to create technologies to solve problems outside of school.  

Livelihoods

Every year, numerous disadvantaged youths migrate to India’s urban centers in search of work.  In response, AIF began its Market Aligned Skills Training (MAST) program. MAST now has 221 centers that have trained 460,304 disadvantaged youth, women, and people with disabilities in workplace readiness and industry skills of various kinds. 

Leadership

Lastly, as an expression of its original mandate to strengthen the bridge between the world’s two largest democracies, AIF started the AIF Banyan Impact Fellowship. Banyan Impact Fellows engage in an immersive volunteer service program involving bi-national cooperation on a number of sustainability and social justice projects.

In all of these programs, AIF partners with both local governments to optimize the scale of its initiatives and NGOs (such as the Clinton Foundation) to optimize their innovativeness. Altogether, AIF has reached over 12.9 million people across 35 states and union territories of India.

Riaz Taplin’s Work at AIF

In keeping with his family’s tradition of volunteer work in India, Riaz Taplin has been involved in AIF’s philanthropic work for over 20 years and joined its board of directors in 2021. Among his accomplishments, Taplin helped create the California division of AIF and organized numerous events that have collectively raised millions of dollars for the organization.

One of Taplin’s biggest accomplishments was funding and arranging the development of a job training center for women in Uttrakhand. This center has empowered 410 women and counting with agricultural and garment sector skills, so they can establish sustainable livelihoods. After the emergence of Covid-19, many women trained at the center came together to produce 61,633 masks for communities in need.

Since its development, Taplin has taken pride in visiting the center and carrying on his family’s tradition of service. As Taplin puts it, “I wouldn’t be who I am today without my experiences of volunteering in India during childhood. At this stage, it’s hard to put into words how inspired I have been by the resilience and vibrancy of the people I’ve encountered there, particularly at AIF’s livelihoods center in Uttrakhand. It keeps me grounded, and it motivates me to always try to do more for others.”

AIF’s mission is to catalyze social and economic change in India and build a lasting bridge between the United States and India through high-impact interventions in education, livelihoods, public health, and leadership development. Working closely with local communities, AIF partners with NGOs to develop and test innovative solutions and with governments to create and scale sustainable impact. With the aim to help create an India free from poverty, AIF has impacted 12.9 million lives across 26 states of India.

Though it’s not always easy, children like Urmila show it’s possible. As Urmila describes her experience of being the first in her family to get a formal education through LAMP, “I feel far more confident now. While earlier I was shy and could barely speak up in class, now I lead the morning prayer sessions in school. I want to become a nurse when I grow up and serve my community.”  If we give underprivileged people throughout the international community the opportunity to realize their potential, the sky’s the limit for their future and our own.