Friends Of The Children Of Orissa

We help the helpers who help the children

We are a Registered Charity, No. 1074935 which helps those who care for and educate the children at the school charity school in Bhubaneswar in Orissa, India.

Every penny we raise goes to the children! When visitors and committee members who visit Orissa regularly do so, they do so on other work and no funds are used for this purpose.

Palli Unnayan Seva Samiti - Our main partner in India

In 1992 Kadambini Bhuyan, the remarkable woman who started PUSS (an India charity organisation) and is still in charge, ably supported by a small team of social workers, school teachers and others, determined to do something for an education system failing even more disadvantaged girl children from other places nearby. She identified 20 little girls from a sexworkers' colony in Orissa who wanted a shool education and whose mothers were anxious to save them from the same life that they have to lead.

PUSS set up a small boarding section on their school for these girls but they needed a regular source of money to support them. Professors Gerry Johnson and Malcolm Harper of Cranfield School of Management who had been teaching in Bhubaneswar at that time, decided to start Friends of PUSS - now friends of the Children of Orissa - to raise money to support the residential shooling of the girls. Since then the number of school children has risen to almost two hundred pupils.

National Lottery grant

We have raised enough money to support these 200 children in the past and we also got a National Lottery grant of £8,000 to enable PUSS to accommodate the children properly in a dedicated boarding school. But there are several thousand little girls in Orissa living on the streets, in railway stations and in leprosy and sexworker colonies. The 1999 cyclone made things worse and the number of children we can assist is limited only by the amount of money we can raise.

If more money was available to Charity organisations such as ours we could significantly improve the local education system with residential / boarding and day schools

We need your continued support to enable PUSS to accommodate, feed and give these children a school education