World NGO Day is an international day dedicated to recognize, celebrate and honour all non-governmental and nonprofit organizations, and the people behind them that contribute to the society all year around.
Education is an influential tool for the individual welfare, bringing in the equality and social Justice, and also to pace up national development and to facilitate the capacity building of all through education requires additional dedicated mechanisms besides the government facilitations and provisions. Hence, NGOs have a big role to play in to improve the access and quality of education and consequent welfare of the people belonging to the marginalised sections.
The general trend in the realm of civil society in recent years in Kashmir has been encouraging. The number of NGOs have increased manifold, the reasons for which are many. With the concept of Civil Society gaining a foothold in India and to a certain extent in Kashmir, starting an NGO has become imperative . There are people or organizations that are making a genuine effort to establish civil society in this violence-ravaged State. The spurt in the growth of NGOs has been spread over different domains. The intervention of NGOs has been crucial, since the Government was found to be lacking in many areas. An overview of the current state of NGOs shows that the main fields in which they are active in Kashmir are the following: orphanages, self-help groups, dialogue groups, medical care, rural development and employment generation-oriented groups, widow care, disappearances, coalitions of NGOs, ecological and environmental groups, and awareness groups.
Most of the NGOs are based in or around Srinagar, even though the areas worst-affected by militancy are the border areas of Kupwara, Pooch, Rajouri, Baramulla etc. While there are some NGOs working in these areas, they are very few in number and are facing great difficulties. Poverty and extreme backwardness left far flung areas including the tribal areas of Poonch and Rajouri neglected even by NGOs and deprived of access to basic facilities like drinking water, education, health care, sanitation and means of livelihood. Among the active NGOs working in Kashmir, orphanages are the most prominent in terms of their work, reputation and goodwill. One of the worst affected groups during this militancy-rife period has been children, who have been rendered homeless, often as orphans.
The number of orphans created over the past more than two decades is estimated to be anywhere from 15 to 25 thousand. However, most of the orphanages house only 100-120 children, and the number of orphanages actually working would not number more than ten. It is easy to see that an unacceptably large number of children are still not being taken care of. While the Government too has established a few orphanages, most of them are in a pitiable condition, and many opine that it might even be better for a child to be kept out of such homes.
The Impact of Violence on the Student Community in Kashmir (2003), that documents the opinions of nearly 200 young Kashmiris on how the violence has affected their lives in terms of their education, its psychological impact etc.
Environmental groups have been active in Kashmir in recent years, especially with the serious ecological problems that the world famous Dal Lake in Srinagar is facing. Therefore, Kashmir needed the immediate attention of environmental NGOs. The Save Dal Campaign was started by an Englishman named Charles Goschen, who was appalled at the condition of the lake during one of his visits to Kashmir. The Green Kashmir movement, started by Charles, managed to build an environment conscious lobby in J&K. However, his untimely death crippled the movement. Though it lives on, the Green Kashmir Movement has split and many more environmental groups, claiming to be working towards the environmental protection of the State, have been formed. One of them, HOPE, came into existence in April 1999, and has been working in the field of Solid Waste Management. HOPE also undertook a Solid Waste Management Project for the Dal Lake, handed over to them by the J&K Lakes and Waterways Development Authority. Workers of HOPE go to every individual houseboat daily to collect their waste. HOPE mainly undertakes projects given to them by the relevant official authorities, besides organizing public awareness campaigns.
NGOs are also playing an essential role in monitoring and evaluation because they act as an overseer or independent assessor of government performances and also check their accountability.As per the findings of the study role of government was missing, if government takes steps on fake organizations and genuine organizations it will get sufficient funds through generating, organizing and raising their funds through various activities for instance; getting grants from funding agencies through various projects, government schemes, and funds can be generated by availing the benefits from student and child scholarship programs along with creating a social media group for effective networking, organizing different awareness events and cultural events as well as organizing small raising funds in that way, they can help in the development of NGOs in Jammu and Kashmir. For the betterment, Liaoning of NGOs to different agencies is very necessary because the greatest challenge for NGOs in the education sector is to recruit, train and retain the professionally trained teachers. Due to the shortage of untrained teachers, NGOs are facing many problems for that the Government should devote or locate more resources for the capacity building of the teachers, who could serve and provide quality services to the clients.For their appropriate excellence and expansion, NGOs’ officials should be aware about the specific training programs that are run by various professional agencies, and it should be made compulsory for them to join such programs enabling them to learn how they can run their NGOs professionally. Undoubtedly NGOs are boon to any developing country, but only if they are audited and supervised by Govt. The functions of NGO are setting an example for serving the humanity. It is performing worthy job in this direction and it has undertaken various projects like abolition of poverty and are working upon various social evils.
