Forty-three Master of Social Work students with Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham decided to spend a month in 14 different villages across the country. The goal of the fieldwork was to practically learn what life is like in rural India, a place where 80% of India’s 270,000,000 poor live.
In the fall of 2017, hurricanes devastated multiple Caribbean Islands including Puerto Rico. Infrastructures for electricity, agriculture, drinking water and telecommunications were destroyed along with many homes and buildings. Many of Puerto Rico’s residents are still living without power and are in desperate need of help.
A team of seventy-one students from Japanese universities visited the Allapuzha District in Kerala to help build water filtration systems for villages there. “Friendship between India and Japan lasts forever!” was their unifying call. The Japanese students’ work joins that of 140 students from Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham.
“Forests play the most important role in maintaining nature’s harmony,” Amma said when addressing the Trillion Tree Campaign in Monaco, Europe via video message. The goal of the Trillion Tree Campaign is to inspire people in all corners of the globe to begin planting trees to offset the effects of CO2 emissions. This is a vital key to, over time, restoring our precious atmosphere to equilibrium.
Families continue to recover more than two months after Cyclone Ockhi hit South India. Swami Amritaswarupananda gave a cheque for $300,000 USD to the Chief Minister of Kerala to contribute to the state’s special Ockhi relief fund. Ockhi sped across the waters at the beginning of December 2017—ripping down coconut trees, destroying homes and power lines, and claiming the lives of fishermen who were out on the waters.
Choti Kumari Singh, a 20-year-old staff member of our Amrita SeRVe Self Reliant Village program, has won the ‘Women’s Creativity in Rural Life Award” from the Switzerland-based Women’s World Summit Foundation for her efforts in uplifting the Musahar community, considered the lowest and most downtrodden in the state’s caste-ridden social system.
At Amritapuri today, we were honored to have the President of India, Shri Ram Nath Kovind, present certificates for totally free surgeries at the Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences (Amrita Hospital) to five onstage beneficiaries. These five individuals were representative of 1,940 economically challenged people receiving such certificates.
At Amritapuri today, President of India, Shri Ram Nath Kovind presented three village leaders with certificates verifying their respective villages as Open Defecation Free. All three village leaders hailed from villages adopted by Embracing the World as part of our Amrita SeRVe (Amrita Self-Reliant Villages) program, launched in 2013.
Today at Embracing the World’s headquarters in Amritapuri, Kerala, India, we announced a major new initiative. Faculty and students of our own Amrita University have conceived and designed modular water filtration system, and having proven the concept, we will provide filtration systems to generate clean drinking water for 10 million villagers throughout the nation. The initiative was inaugurated by the President of India, Shri Ram Nath Kovind.
Amrita University’s research center AMMACHI Labs is committed to innovations that will help make proper sanitation possible for all Indians. The center has now developed a new mould-based technique for toilet construction that makes constructing toilets easy, efficient and economically viable.