In Nagar: denying schooling to the deprived

“This is the school,” Atul Bhosale’s earnest finger is pointing at a small, two-room concrete structure standing in the midst of barren fields at the edge of Gundegaon village in Maharashtra. You can’t miss it on your way to the village, walking along the muddy road that eventually gets you to a small Pardhi settlement about a kilometre away.

That school, a pale-yellow concrete structure with blue windows, colourful cartoons and a row of painted faces of Indian freedom fighters on the walls, commands your attention. It stands out even more, in contrast to the makeshift huts and mud houses with tarpaulin roofs that are the homes of the 20 Pardhi families here.

“ Aata aamchyakade vikaas mhanje ni shalach aahe. Vikasachi nishani [This school is the only thing we have in the name of development for us here],” says 46-year-old Atul Bhosale about Pautkavasti, the name by which his hamlet is known in the Nagar taluka of Ahmednagar district.

“ Doosara kay nay. Vastit yaayla rasta naay, paani naay, light naay kay, pakki ghar naayit [There is nothing else. No roads. No water. No light. No pucca houses]. The school is close by, so our kids are at least learning to read and write,” he says. Atul is proud of this tiny place of learning. It is the place where his children Sahil and Shabnam study with 16 other students – seven girls and nine boys.

This is the same school the state government is planning to move and merge elsewhere. And that’s a shocker for this way-below-the-poverty-line community. A nomadic group and a Denotified Tribe, the Pardhis are listed as a Scheduled Tribe in Maharashtra .

This tribe has suffered extreme discrimination and deprivation for over a century and a half. In 1871, the British Raj enforced a ‘Criminal Tribes Act’ (CTA) aimed at suppressing nearly 120 Adivasi groups and other castes – mostly those who would not accept British suzerainty. The Pardhis were listed in it. The core idea of this Act was that you were a criminal-by-birth if born into any of these groups. The CTA was repealed in 1952 in Independent India, denotifying the victimised communities. But the stigma has never died down. Pardhis find regular employment near impossible. Their children trying to attend regular schools are bullied and often beaten.

For this marginalised community, that school represents more than just the only pukka structure in their settlement. It is the one precious piece of human development they possess – not a symbol of sarkari development. Possibly a route to decent employment for their children. Only a social group so brutally excluded for so long from ‘mainstream’ education can fully sense what the loss of the school would mean to them.

“My children can speak well in Marathi. They can read. We can’t,” says Atul’s wife Rupali Bhosale, 41. “But I have heard [from teachers] that the government is going to take the school away from here,” she adds.

Disbelief and anxiety fill Atul’s voice equally. “Will they really do that?” he asks.

Sadly, they really will. Not just the Pautkavasti school but over 14,000 others in the state will be affected by closures, shifts and mergers if the Maharashtra government proceeds with its present plans.

The red of the Marathi letters in which the name of this place of learning is painted on the front wall – Pautkavasti Gundegaon Primary Zilla Parishad School – is still readable.  Even after 17 years. The school was built in 2007 under the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan – a flagship education programme of the Government of India – and has been providing primary education from Class 1 to 4 to the children of this settlement. The idea then, now painted on the school wall, was: Pratyek mul shalet jaayil, ekhi mul ghari na raahil (Every child will go to school, not a single child will stay at home).

It seemed a great idea at the time.

But a more recent official circular of September 21, 2023 , states that in the interest of academic quality, ‘holistic development, and provision of adequate educational facilities among children,’ schools with fewer than 20 students in certain areas will be merged into a bigger ‘cluster school’ or samooh shala . This process of bringing together small shalas into one cluster school is being implemented under clause 7 of the National Education Policy 2020 .

The principal of the Pautkavasti GZPS, Kusalkar Gangaram, has been asked to submit the total number of children in his care so that the state can assess the possibility of merging it into a cluster school. And he is also anxious. “Children are studying well. Numbers, English-Marathi alphabets, poems. They can read.

“We don’t have toilets in the school, nor drinking water taps,” he continues almost apologetically. “But spending funds on these will cost less than building a completely new, bigger structure. There is the Manemala Vasti School and a few others as well, with less than 20 students. Merging all these is not feasible. This school needs to be here, near the children,” he says, his voice as clear as his thoughts now.

“It has been hard work for us teachers to inculcate the learning habit among these children,” says Gangaram. “If the GZPS moves beyond walking distance, these kids will remain deprived of primary education,” he says.

The new cluster school has to be “less than 40 minutes by bus” and free bus rides will be provided from government and CSR [Corporate Social Responsibility] funds, the official circular says. “There is no clarity on the distance. What does 40 minutes mean; exactly how far away? It would certainly be more than one kilometre,” points out Kusalkar. The promise of free bus services does not seem convincing to him.

“The high school is four kilometres from this settlement. Children have to walk through deserted roads to get there and many, especially girls, drop out because it is unsafe. Where are the free bus rides?” Gangaram asks. Last year, seven or eight students did not continue with their studies after Class 4, he says. They now go to work with their parents.

You’d think the lack of public transportation and the distance between home and school are challenges enough, but there’s more. That the parents of these students need to go to work – and often migrate in search of it – adds to it. In the monsoon, most of them toil as agricultural workers on farms nearby – and sometimes not so nearby. For the rest of the year, they seek work at construction sites in Ahmednagar town, 34 kms away.

“There are no ST buses or sharing jeeps here. We walk 8-9 kilometres to get to the main road before finding some vehicle to go in for work,” Atul says. “You need to be at that labour naka in time by 6 or 7 in the morning. It will be a hard choice for us if our kids have to go to a faraway school,” says Rupali. “We have to search for work every day, the whole year.” Both Rupali and Atul together earn no more than 400-450 rupees a day – and that for around 150 days. So finding more work wherever they can in the rest of the year is essential to keep their household afloat.

The NEP 2020 policy document claims that small schools are difficult for the government to manage. Their size, it says, makes them “economically suboptimal and operationally complex to run…in terms of deployment of teachers and the provision of critical physical resources.” They pose a systemic challenge for governance and management as “the geographical dispersion, challenging access conditions, and the very large numbers of schools make it difficult to reach all schools equally.”

While small schools may present diverse kinds of challenges, mergers don’t seem to produce any great answers. Not if one looks at the Maharashtra government’s first experiment at this in Pune’s Panshet village. The first school to be redeveloped as the cluster school in Velhe taluka is reported to be grappling with issues of staff shortage and lack of basic infrastructure and more, even as the government pushes for a state-wide expansion of the project.

“Small schools in hilly areas and isolated places are indeed a serious issue. But there seems to be no other way of providing good education in those schools, even if the numbers of children are small,” says Jandhyala B G Tilak, an eminent scholar specialising in the economics of education. He was replying to a questionnaire PARI had emailed him.

“Mergers go against the norms of the Right To Education (RTE),” he adds. The Act mandates that for children in Classes 1 to 5, the school should ideally be within a kilometre of their neighbourhood. And can have a minimum of 20 children in the age group of 6-11 years.

“Also it looks irrational to have a 'full' school with 2-3 teachers, and all facilities promised in the RTE – for one with some 5-10 children. Administrators often raise this issue. We need to think of innovative measures. Mergers, though attractive, are not a good solution,” Tilak explains.

But for the Maharashtra state education department the question is not limited to Pautkavasti school. The 2023 circular states that there are ‘14,783 schools’ with ‘1 to 20’ students, with a total of 1,85,467 pupils across the state, that need to be merged into bigger clusters. For them, uncertainty looms large.

“These schools are small for various reasons,” says Geeta Mahashabde speaking about the history of smaller shalas . She is the director of the non-profit Navnirmiti Learning Foundation.

In the year 2000, the Maharashtra government started the Vasti Shala Yojana – literally a programme for setting up schools in small settlements like Pautkavasti – under the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan. “That government plan was to identify those children who were away from education and open new schools for them, in their own hamlets, or in the otherwise inaccessible hilly areas. The scheme was also known as the Mahatma Phule Shikshan Hami Kendra Yojana,” Geeta says.

According to the scheme, a Vasti Shala can have about 15 students from Class 1-4. The numbers could be relaxed with the approval of the Zilla Parishad or the Municipal Executive Committee. In exceptional circumstances, the number of students could even be as few as 10.

Accordingly, the state launched about eight thousand Vasti Shalas between 2000 and 2007.

However, in March 2008, the government decided to shut down the scheme, calling it a ‘temporary arrangement.’

“The Maharashtra government appointed a committee to study the condition of these schools and give recommendations,” says Geeta. The committee, of which she was a member, recommended converting some of the schools to regular primary schools. Between 2008 and 2011, the state government decided to regularize 6,852 Vasti Shalas as primary schools and shut down 686 others.

Another decade down the line, all this could be reversed. The discussion has shifted to shutting down even such regularised schools under NEP 2020. “There is no reason to shut down regularized schools,” says Geeta. “Even if students are less in number, the settlement is still there, and kids there have no other way to access education.

“ Padgham varti tipri padli, tadam tattad tadam….( A stroke on the drum says tadam tattad tadam ) . Atul’s eight-year-old daughter Shabnam is excited by the chance to demonstrate her learning. “I like reading poems,” she says. And is reading us one from her Class 3 Marathi textbook.

“I can subtract, minus, plus. I know the table till 5. Paach eeke paach, Paach dune daaha….,” [Five ones are five; five twos are ten] Sahil interrupts in a bid to outdo his sister.

The siblings love going to school, but not just for poetry and mathematics. “I like it because I get to meet all the children from our vasti [settlement] and we play langdi [hopscotch] and kho-kho during recess,” Sahil says. All the children in the Pautkavasti GZPS are first generation learners.

“Seeing their interest in school and study makes us feel really happy,” says their mother Rupali, sitting outside her mud hut. The fear of their school closing down overshadows the happiness on her face. Neither she nor her husband Atul have ever gone to school. Access to education has always been a challenge for the Pardhi community. Census 2011 tells us there are 223,527 Pardhis in Maharashtra. After decades of multiple policy interventions, even primary education has not reached many Pardhi children.

“Nobody goes to school here,” says 10-year-old Aakash Barde nonchalantly. He lives in another Pardhi hamlet in Shirur taluka, about 76 km away from Pautkavasti. The primary and secondary school are three kms away from this Shindodi colony on the banks of the Kukadi river. That’s too far for him to walk to. “I catch fish sometimes. I like fishing,” he says. “My parents work on brick kilns and construction sites. They are out for mazdoori [labour work] for 3-4 months. I don’t remember them telling me about the school ever, nor did I think about it.”

None of the 21 children in the 5-14 age group in this settlement go to school.

A survey from 2015 on the educational status of Maharashtra’s nomadic and denotified tribes says that between 2006-07 and 2013-14, a total of over 2.2 million children from these groups were not enrolled in schools.

“Parents of many of these children work outside, in Mumbai or Pune. Children stay behind, alone, a few of them go with their parents,” says 58-year-old Kantabai Barde. Kantabai leaves her granddaughters, Ashwini, nine, and Twinkle, six, behind when she, her son, and her daughter-in-law migrate to work on sugarcane farms in Sangli. None of the girls attend school.

Twinkle was born in a sugarcane field, she says. When the family tried to get her enrolled in the school, they asked for a dakhla (birth certificate). “No ASHA worker comes here. Our children, grandchildren are all born at home. There is no dakhla ,” says Kantabai.

“I mostly stay with my sister. Alone,” says young Ashwini. “ Mothi aai (grandmother) comes back for a few weeks to look after us. I can cook a full meal, even bhakri . I don’t know about school. Never thought about it. I have seen girls in uniforms. They look nice,” she says with a giggle.

Like Aakash, Ashwini, and Twinkle in Shindodi, nearly 13 per cent of males and 19 per cent  of females across rural India, in the age group 3-35, have never enrolled in any educational institution, according to the National Sample Survey (NSS), 2017-18 .

“Other people call us chor (thief). They call us dirty and don’t allow us in their village. How will we send the children to school?” Kantabai does not find schools a safe place for children in her community.

Decades after the repeal of the Criminal Tribes Act, the Pardhis continue to bear the burden of being branded by it. (Read: No crime, unending punishment ). Lack of important documents like birth certificates, aadhaar card, voting cards and more, make it hard for them to access government schemes (Read: My grandchildren will build their own house and Pardhi school bulldozed by Prosperity Highway ). And it is the stigma that makes the children of the community drop out from school even if they get in.

A 2017 survey by the Council for Social Development, Hyderabad, on Denotified, Nomadic, and Semi-Nomadic Tribes in 25 districts of Maharashtra, says that in 38 per cent of the 199 Pardhi households it covered, children dropped out after primary school due to discrimination, language barriers, marriage and low awareness about the importance of education.

“Education is not for our children. Society still despises us. I don’t think anything can change,” Kantabai says ominously.

Her words seem frighteningly true. In 1919 the great social reformer and educator from Maharashtra, Karmaveer Bhaurao Patil, was determined to take education to the raiyat (masses) and advocated for vasti tithe shala (a school in every settlement). Well, 105 years later, a school is yet to reach Shindodi. It took 90 years for one to reach Pautkavasti – and that is now in danger of disappearing in the wake of a policy storm, leaving the children of the community totally adrift.

The words painted on the ZP Pautkavasti school wall read:

Shikshan hakkachi kimya nyaari,
shikshan ganga aataa gharoghari.

(With the enchanting magic of the right to education
the Ganga of learning will flow in every house.)

How long before those words come true?