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Beyond basics

P Devarajan

Coaching classes outside schooling hours that are partially funded by the adivasis themselves has ushered in a new commitment to education.

DHAMMAK, dhammak ata hathi; dhammak, dhammak jata hati (The elephant comes dham, dham; it goes away dham, dham), -- goes the chant of adivasi children and elders in the evening darkness at Khota village, Shahpur bloc, Betul district. It is about seven an d dusk is just receding when the power goes off, the school teacher lights a kerosene lamp and one can dimly recognise some 50 boys, girls and elders in a rectangular thatched hut peering at teaching aids to learn a bit of arithmetic.

Eight-year-old Chhoti Bai in a scrappy frock stumbles along in the darkness with her smaller sister and brother before making it to the class. There is no timing, no reluctance, no compulsion. There are no text-books, only slates, pencils and some teachi ng kits from Eklavya.

The surprisingly neat Khota village lies in a green-brown valley walled in by the Kullurghant hills in the north, Bhawarghat hills in the west and Bhaskindeo in the west and is about 50 kms from Shahpur. Tall teak trees strung with big, green leaves afte r the early June showers apart from mango, neem, mahuwa, tendu, palash and others make the forests. Stars and planets flicker like far off traffic lights from a dome like sky and one walks along a twisting grassy track with a young Ghanshyam Tiwari of Ek lavya to talk about a teaching experiment started some five months ago.

By eight the darkness engulfed us and one identified Ghanshyam more by his voice than by his substantial size. Eklavya has thought up the Shiksha Prothsahan (Promotion of education) programme at five centres: Khota village, Kamti, Mardanpur, Baratha and Adma Dhana.

The programme took off when some adivasis rued the poor facilities at the government run primary school and the Padna, Badna Sangh programme. Despite earning a monthly salary of over Rs. 5,000 per month, the teacher never reported for duty at the primary school regularly. Under the Padna, Badna Sangh programme, the State Government paid a teacher Rs. 100 for every individual who became literate and the inevitable cooking up of numbers took place to pocket funds.

Ghanshyam promised to help any voluntary effort of the adivasis and today the classes run in two shifts: the morning shift from 7am to 9am and the second from 7 pm to 10 pm. The teacher comes from the village and is paid Rs. 500 per month, Rs..250 coming from the contributions of adivasis and Rs. 250 from Eklavya.

In the mornings, children attend the school to complete their homework before attending the primary school which starts at around 11. With this, the teaching regimen has improved in the primary school as the adivasis put pressure on the government teache r to perform. In one case, the teacher repeated a homework of writing one to 100 for five days for a girl, when the girl had mastered it. The teacher had to face vociferous protests from the villagers.

The evening school is meant for children who are busy through the day tending the farm or looking after cattle. Along with their parents they gather in the evening to learn of the wide world. A village committee oversees the operations and decides upon t he lessons to be taught every month and is perhaps the first school where there is a monthly syllabus.

Going by Ghanshyam Tiwari and his friends, there is a demand from some 37 villages for similar facilities but wisely the team would like to go slow. ``We would like to study and examine the experiment before extending it,'' says Tiwari and he is probably right as even a small problem could hurt the programme.

Initially some of the adivasis were not keen on putting up a monthly Rs. 5 though they had little trouble in raising well over Rs. 100 for festivals. They gave in when the point was brought up at village meetings and today they have no hesitation.

One of Tiwari's team comes up with an interesting incident. An adivasi woman found the village teacher under the Shiksha Prothsahan Programme spending Rs. 5 on a daily basis to buy ghutka and opposed it. The practice stopped.

But for the 70 families in Khota village even a Rs. 5 per month in the off season is difficult. Mahuwa and tendu leaves picking are seasonal as much as wheat growing and during off season they find money hard to come by. But Tiwari has sorted the problem by accepting donations in kind like a few kilos of wheat or tendu leaves.

Tiwari and his team are not going to town with their achievements as they have to stabilise the experiment and place it on a sustainable basis. But for an outsider like this writer the idea has a huge potential as literacy if not education is at least be ing taken out of government-managed boards and a rather `loony' education industry.

Moreover it is affordable as even the very poor can somehow squeeze in. From Tiwari one gets the impression of families persistently raising the query ``What happens after primary class?'' The middle schools (classes 6-8) in most cases are about six to e ight kms from the village and most kids (and surely not the girls) cannot attend them. ``Education gets stuck,'' exclaims an adivasi. and as if today they seem to be less bothered about jobs after basic education is completed.

At Hoshangabad along with the now familiar science and social science teaching programme, the Eklavya team is trying to push for reforms in the syllabi of classes nine and ten. The team has been able to change the very nature of studying any science be i t physics or economics and its open book exams have helped students overcome the problem of examination fever.

Scholars like Ms. Rashmi Paliwal are trying to redraw the contours of learning in Classes 9 and 10 and admit it is going to be tough to get the Madhya Pradesh government interested.

The Hoshangabad science programme was started in 1972 as a pilot project in 16 schools of Hoshangabad district by Kishore Bharati and Friends Rural Centre. It was scaled up to all the 250 middle schools of Hoshangabad district in 1978. Similar programmes have developed in Gujarat and Rajasthan. One jocularly asks historian Mr. C.N. Subramaniam whether the day will come when children will teach themselves keeping the elders out of the class room. For this writer the Shiksha Prothsahan idea looks a topper and is far ahead of the other interventions in education.