Damodar Acharya

Co-founder

Co-founder of The Concerned for Working Children (CWC)

Damodar Acharya is the co-founder of The Concerned for Working Children (CWC) (1979)[1], an Indian non-profit working on human rights and orphans & child care from Bengaluru.

Damodar Acharya, known as Damu, is an Indian activist and one of the founding members of The Concerned for Working Children (CWC), a Bangalore-based non-profit organisation working on the rights of working children. He is the organisation's executive director.

CWC, founded in 1985, is known internationally for supporting working children to organise themselves and to take part in decisions that affect them. Acharya's work addresses child labour and distress migration by tackling the conditions in rural areas that push children into cities to work.

Career

Acharya's activism began in the trade union movement in the early 1980s, when he worked with unions organising hotel workers in Bangalore. He was among the founding members of The Concerned for Working Children in 1985 and is now its executive director.

His work focuses on the reasons children leave rural homes for urban work, and on creating local alternatives to that migration through education and local self-government. He has more than fifteen years of field experience in programmes that enable children to organise themselves and to participate in decision-making at every level, and has worked on what CWC calls children's protagonism and governance.

CWC helped bring together Bhima Sangha, a union of and for working children formed in Bangalore in April 1990, which grew to around 20,000 members, and was involved in launching the National Movement of Working Children.

Acharya is a member of the CHAKRA network established by Professor Hiran Dias at the Asian Institute of Technology in Bangkok.

Recognition

Acharya is an Ashoka Fellow, elected for his work on rural livelihoods and child migration.[2][3][4]

The Concerned for Working Children (CWC)

The Concerned for Working Children is a Bangalore-based nonprofit that works to end child labour by making children key protagonists in solving their own problems rather than passive recipients of aid. It founded Bhima Sangha, a union of and for working children, and the National Movement of Working Children, and works on children's rights, gender equality, education and local governance.

The Concerned for Working Children (CWC) reports the following, on its own site: