Language and Inequality

My CI, Active English was lately joined together with another CI, Pre - Akshara English.
Both CI's used to teach basic English to 5th, 6th and 7th graders in the Azde village government school twice a week. Due to changing attitudes towards our activities in the Azde School we have contacted the Paud School and are now shifting our activities there.
Last Thursday was the first time I went down with the CI down to the Paud School, and it has really made me think. This is my second year in India, and I have been travelling in both south and north. I've been living here in "rural Maharashtra" (?) for the last year and visited some of the biggest cities in India - Delhi, Bombay, Pune, Cochin and Calcutta, yet the inequalities in India had never appeared so brutal and real to me as when I visited this Paud school.

3 kids on one (little) table, 60 kids in class room, the English teacher that does not speak English... No syllabus, just a text book (which is in a much higher level than the kids are), the closed mindedness that I can not explain.

Some of my co-years and I started a new CI that helps 12th graders from the Paud high school in preparing for their final English exams. They are all in my age, and all very eager to succeed. All of them have been writing essays on how important education is and how they want to have a job and be successful during our last in class assignment. And this keeps striking me – we are exactly at the same age, and I know they are not lazy and success is important for them – yet they have been prevented from the education I have been complaining about back home. How big is the gap between me and them, and more striking, between an Indian who studies in muwci and an Indian that studies in a government school in the village.

And this also relates so much to our last Global Affairs session in which some people in my discussion mentioned how English has so much to do with the elite English speaking class that exists today in India.
I don’t know how a country can keep on functioning like that. It seems not much is done about the circle of education, of English…
After talking so much in class about hypothetical equality and socialism, I'm trying to think – what could be done? What is being done in India? How can such inequality prevail?
It also makes me think of our role as a CI. Are we really helping these kids? What does this hour a week do, especially since we seem not to get completely through or completely understood, especially with the language barrier?
Wouldn't it be great if we could change these kids' life? If we could walk in to the classroom and communicate, and explain and be understood? Sometimes I feel we could have done so much more if we all spoke Hindi or Marathi, that this is what these kids need, real communication.

I'm not sure what this post is about. It is about language, practical inequality, and our role, a little bit, I guess. Hope it's not too messy.