The Right to Education and The Reality

The Right to Education assuring eight years of schooling to all children is there on paper in this country but the reality is quite different. The poor people, who find it difficult to make ends meet as it is, are rarely able to spare the money for the education of their children. Therefore, it devolves on the Government to provide free schooling to the poor children under the Right to Education Act. Unfortunately in remote Adivasi areas like the ones in Alirajpur district in which the Khedut Mazdoor Chetna Sangath operates, the Government does not provide for the education of children adequately. What it does is appoint some guest teachers on an ad hoc basis. Each year at the start of the academic session in June advertisements are given asking for applications from prospective teachers. By the time the whole process of selection is over it is about October. So a single teacher per school is appointed in November without any training whatsoever and she is retained till March when the examinations are conducted and then the teacher is laid off resulting in only five months of teaching in an year. The teacher is paid only Rs 2400 per month for teaching children of various ages in multiple grades in one school housed in the hut of one of the villagers. It is easy to imagine what effect on the quality of pedagogy such working conditions will have. In most cases these teachers do not teach at all. Since all children are passed automatically in Madhya Pradesh till they reach class ten, all that the teachers have to do is maintain false records of attendance and then submit false evaluation reports. Thus, in government records there is hundred percent enrolment and passing of children in all the classes and everyone in the administration is clapping themselves on their back saying that the Right to Education has been guaranteed.

Consequently, given this sorry state of affairs, the KMCS has been running a residential school in village Kakrana since the 2001 to provide quality education to children. However, this is not enough and still huge numbers of children are without education in many villages. So the KMCS began running three schools in 2013 so as to improve the access to education for children in remote villages. Two of these villages had the government guest teacher schools while one had no school. Bada Amba and Chilakda, which have guest teacher schools are on the banks of the River Narmada, while Khatamri, which is without any school is up in the Vindhya Hills a little way inside from the Narmada. The people in these villages all belong to the Bhil Scheduled Tribe. The school in Bada Amba in progress is pictured below.

The school in Chilakda which is running since July 2013 along with the one in Bada Amba now has its own building constructed by the people of the village and is shown in the picture below. 

The school in Khatamri began in December 2013 and has a lady teacher and is shown below. 

Presented below is the evaluation report of the performance of the children studying in these schools. The official enrolment in the school in Bada Amba is as shown below in Table 1.

 Table 1: Total Enrolment in School in Bada Amba

Age in Years	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	Total
Boys	6	6	2	4	4	4	4	2	32
Girls	6	6	2	4	4	2	4	2	30
Total	12	12	4	8	8	6	8	4	62

However, all these children do not attend the school. The people are so poor and their single cropped farms so small and unproductive that they have to migrate to Gujarat seasonally to labour in the farms and urban construction sites there to augment their income once the Kharif crop has been harvested. They take their children along with them and this prevents the latter from attending school. Generally there is some scepticism also among the parents regarding the utility of education and so they prefer to have their children grazing livestock or labouring on the farms and in the houses rather than attending school. The number of children who are regularly attending school are given in Table 2 below.

Table 2: Children Regularly Attending School in Bada Amba

Age in Years	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	Total
Boys		2	3	2	1			1	9
Girls	2	6	5	2					15
Total	2	8	8	4	1			1	24

Thus, only 38.7 per cent of the total enrolled children are regularly attending school. Among boys the proportion is very low at 28.1 per cent while among girls it is much better at 50 per cent.  The reading, writing and arithmetic skills acquired by the regularly attending children in the past one year is given in Table 3 below.

Table 3: Proficiency Level of Children in Bada Amba School

Subject	Level of Proficiency	Boys	Girls	Total
Hindi	Reading and Writing of Alphabets	6	13	19
	Reading and Writing of Words	1	2	3
	Reading and Writing of Sentences	2		2
	Total	9	15	24
English	Reading and Writing of Alphabets	3	6	9
	Reading and Writing of Words	3	2	5
	Total	6	8	14
Arithmetic	Reading and Writing of Numbers	6	13	19
	Simple Addition, Subtraction and Multiplication	1	2	3
	Addition, Subtraction and Multiplication with Carryover	2
	Total	9	15	24

The two older boys have made considerable progress in Hindi, English and Arithmetic. Two of the slightly younger boys and two girls can do simple arithmetic and read and write words in Hindi and English. The rest of the children are at the rudimentary stage of reading and writing the alphabets and numbers and ten students cannot read or write the English alphabet. 

The total enrolment in the school in Chilakda is given in Table 4 below.

Table 4: Total Enrolment in School in Chilakda

Age in Years	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	Total
Boys	6	14	4	2	1	1	4	32
Girls	5	9	3	2	4	1	2	26
Total	11	23	7	4	5	2	6	58

Due to the same reasons as mentioned for Bada Amba earlier, in Chilakda too all the children enrolled in school do not attend regularly though the attendance is more than in the former. The number of children who are regularly attending school are given in Table 5 below.

Table 5: Children Regularly Attending School in Chilakda

Age in Years	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	Total
Boys	6	10	4	2	1		1	24
Girls	4	2		1				7
Total	10	12	4	3	1		1	31

In Chilakda 53.4 per cent of the children enrolled in school attend regularly. Among boys the proportion is higher at 75 per cent while for girls it is very much lower at 26.9 per cent. There is greater attrition among the older children and girls. Child marriage is a common custom among the Bhils and girls especially are married off very early once they attain puberty and that is the reason for the high attrition rate among the older girls. The reading, writing and arithmetic skills acquired by the regularly attending children in the past one year is given in Table 6 below.

Table 6: Proficiency Level of Children in Chilakda School

Subject	Level of Proficiency	Boys	Girls	Total
Hindi	Reading and Writing of Alphabets	18	6	24
	Reading and Writing of Words	1		1
	Reading and Writing of Sentences	5	1	6
	Total	24	7	31
English	Reading and Writing of Alphabets	18	6	24
	Reading and Writing of Words	6	1	7
	Total	24	7	31
Arithmetic	Reading and Writing of Numbers	18	6	24
	Simple Addition, Subtraction and Multiplication	4	1	5
	Addition, Subtraction and Multiplication with Carryover	2		2
	Total	24	7	31

Once again the two older boys have made considerable progress in one year and can read and write sentences in Hindi, read words in English and do addition, subtraction and multiplication with carryover. Four slightly younger boys and one girl can do simple arithmetic and read and write sentences in Hindi and read and write words in English. The rest of the children are at a rudimentary stage of reading and writing the Hindi and English alphabets and numbers. The proficiency levels in Chilakda are better than in Bada Amba because the parents take a little more interest and the teacher is more skilled even though both teachers are formally eighth class pass.

Khatamri village does not have even the rudimentary guest teacher Government school. Some children of this village study in hostel schools elsewhere. There was a long standing demand for a school here but due to the lack of a suitable teacher it could not be started. Finally one of the youth of the village married an eighth class pass girl and this lady was appointed as teacher in December 2013. The parents in this village are very proactive and from the beginning have sent their children to the school. They have also imposed a rupee one per day fine if a child does not attend. Consequently the attendance is regular and in a short time the children have acquired considerable proficiency. The number of children attending school are shown in Table 7 below. In this village the age of the children is a little less than in the other two villages earlier. Khatamri in fact is the remotest and smallest hamlet of the large village Vakner. That is why there are less number of children as compared to the other villages.

Table 7: Children Regularly Attending School in Khatamri

Age in Years	4	5	6	7	8	9	Total
Boys	3	1		5			9
Girls	3	3		4	2	1	13
Total	6	4		9	2	1	22

 The lady teacher and the parents are very diligent and so the quality of teaching too is good. So much so that some parents have withdrawn their children studying in the Government hostel schools in other nearby villages and enrolled them in this school. The reading, writing and arithmetic skills acquired by the children in the past five months is given in Table 8 below.

Table 8: Proficiency Level of Children in Khatamri School

Subject	Level of Proficiency	Boys	Girls	Total
Hindi	Reading and Writing of Alphabets	4	6	10
	Reading and Writing of Words	5	1	6
	Reading and Writing of Sentences		6	6
	Total	9	13	22
English	Reading and Writing of Alphabets	9	10	19
	Reading and Writing of Words		3	3
	Total	9	13	22
Arithmetic	Reading and Writing of Numbers	9	10	19
	Simple Addition, Subtraction and Multiplication		3	3
	Addition, Subtraction and Multiplication with Carryover
	Total	9	13	22

Three of the older girls have picked up simple arithmetic skills and six of them can read and write sentences in Hindi. The rest are at a rudimentary stage.

Clearly more inputs are needed. The villagers of Chilakda first and then Bada Amba later have built separate schools contributing their labour and wooden materials. Some support has been provided to buy the roof tiles. The school in Chilakda is now functional while the one in Bada Amba is still under construction as shown in the picture below. 

The teachers have undergone training for a week in the Adharshila Learning Centre which is a residential school set up for Adivasi children by another Adivasi organisation, Adivasi Mukti Sangathan, in the adjacent Barwani district. The picture below shows the training in progress.

The teachers are all formally class eight pass. However, at the start of the training it became evident that some of them were at the class four level while others were even weaker. They have been taught how to teach better and this will improve the quality of pedagogy next year. The schools are currently closed for the summer holidays and will reopen for the next session in June 2014. There will be another short training of the teachers just before the schools start followed by follow up trainings once every quarter thereafter. The teachers will do three surveys during this holiday period in their respective villages. The first will be to document all the flora and fauna. The second will be to document all the crops that are planted. The third will be to document all the herbs that are used by their local medicine men to cure various diseases.

Education has a very close link with human development. All the countries with high levels of human development have high levels of public investment in education right from the primary to the tertiary levels. Unfortunately right from the time of independence, the education sector has been plagued with low public investment and even lesser accountability of the what little investment has been made. Government schools across the country are woefully understaffed and under provisioned and the local people, especially Adivasis eking out a precarious existence in remote regions have little control over their functioning. They have neither the wherewithal nor the belief to provide for the education of their children. The KMCS with the help of some external help sourced through crowd funding on the Internet is trying to do something to improve matters in this crucial sphere. A lot remains to be done and it is hoped that this initiative will become better with the passage of time. The total cost including the salaries and training of the three teachers comes to Rupees Two Lakhs annually. The bank account for transferring funds electronically is -
Dhas Gramin Vikas Kendra
Current Account Number - 024105500603
ICICI Bank, Ashok Nagar, Indore, Madhya Pradesh -452001
IFSC - ICIC00000241

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