Bihar girl uplifts her community | Fusion - WeRIndia

The Musahar community is one of the most downtrodden communities in the whole state of Bihar. However, the life of the young children there may now be improving, thanks to the creative efforts of one woman.

Choti Kumari Singh, a 20-year-old Bihari woman, has now become the youngest person in the world to have received the Women’s Creativity in Rural Life Award, which is from the Switzerland-based Women’s World Summit Foundation.

This award, which is worth about ₹65,000, was given to her because of her efforts to uplift and improve the lives of the children in the Musahar community.

People in the Musahar community struggle with poverty, illiteracy, and child marriages. Many of the people there own no land and instead work as poor laborers.

However, Choti came to the community under a program run by the Mata Amritanandamayi Math, which had adopted 101 villages in the country with the goal in mind of making them self-reliant.

She began her work in her village of Ratnapur in 2014, where she began offering free tuition classes to the children in the village, after their school hours were done. The task of bringing the children to the classes proved to be a difficult one, since their parents seemed to show no interest in their education.

However, Choti was not deterred by the disinterest of the children’s parents. She went from door to door, gathering up children, and trying to convince parents of the value of their children’s education in the meantime.

Despite the difficulty of the task of beginning the classes, when they did begin, over 100 children would come to them, and they were a massive success. Initially, the villages were hostile to Choti and her classes, and they would often verbally abuse her.

However, once they saw the positive effect of the classes on their children, they began to have a more favorable attitude toward Choti and their children’s education.

Now, Choti’s achievement of earning the Women’s Creativity in Rural Life Award proves just how much of an impact education can have on a previously-downtrodden community.

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