A Field Worker’s Diary _ Part 63
The classroom that I am sitting in this photo has one speciality. Taken around seven years back, this place adjoins a big under-construction gated-community in Bengaluru city. All the construction workers working in those apartments had come to Bengaluru from various other places for this work. Generally, the construction work goes on for 9 to 12 months. After the work is finished, they go back to their native places. For their several months’ of stay there, they build temporary tents for themselves. This classroom was in the middle of those tents. Its name is also ‘Tent School’. Generally, when migrant labour families migrate to another place, their children stay back at these tents when parents
go to work. Some children play together. If they were a little older, they spend their time taking care of other younger children. They don’t have the opportunity to go to school until the construction work is completed and they go back home. Most of the construction work takes place either in prime areas of cities or in suburbs where there is no accessibility to public schools. Even if they were, since they weren’t locals, they aren’t allowed to attend.
This was a temporary school run by a Foundation in the middle of the tents for children who miss school for many months a year or who haven’t ever seen a school. Once the construction work gets completed and the migrant families go back to their native places, the school also changes its place.
In fact, this was a program being run by the Karnataka education department. Keeping in mind the target of putting children in the age group of 4 to 14 in schools as set by the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan program and with the good intention of bringing schools closer to children, the department thought of this novel initiative. However, there were many problems in front of the government in running this program. Therefore, they teamed up with non-government organizations (NGOs) that were working locally with people. As a part of this, the Foundation which I am working with ran close to 10 ‘Tent Schools’ in various construction sites. We used to receive books and mid-day meals from the government. Setting up the schools, appointing teachers and managing the everyday classes was our responsibility. The management of these ‘Tent Schools’ was no joke. For establishing the schools, finding the land itself became a big hassle. Normally, the builder who is doing the construction shows the space for setting up tents for workers. So, we need the permission of the builder for running our school in the middle of their tents. Some builders used to trouble us so much for giving a little bit of place for setting up that one tiny classroom. While others would give the space quite happily. There were some who even gave the necessary electricity, lights, fans, etc, for the classroom.
After finding the place and building the temporary room, the next on the list was finding a teacher who can teach there. That was the most difficult of the works. They were temporary schools. Moreover, most of them were in the suburbs of the city. Most of the migrant workers’ houses were dirty. It was obviously tough to find a teacher because who would agree to travel so long to teach in such a place that too temporally. Still, we managed to find good teachers. There is no dearth of needs in our country. Nor is there real dearth of goodness. Some came to work because they couldn’t find other work, others joined because they loved the work. There was such a person who loved their work in this school which I went as well.
However much of experience you had, teaching here was not an easy task for anyone. The classroom had a maximum of around 20 to 30 children. They were all in the age group of 4 to 14. Some of them even bring the babies in their household to the classes. There is an Aaya to take care of the babies. But, how does a teacher take a class when children from 1st to 8th or 9th classes sit in the same room. That’s why, the teachers use a teaching method called ‘Nalli Kalli’ in the class. It was a process where children in different ages and classes are made to sit in the same classroom and learn different things through the support of other children. The teacher supports them in the role of a facilitator by helping them to learn on their own.
Nonetheless, there was another challenge here. That was the issue of language. Some of the children in the Tent School I visited were migrants from North Karnataka, the rest were from West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh.
So, our teacher had to know Hindi as well as Kannada. We had to see from where the children in each Tent School come from and had to find a teacher who knew all those languages. Even though this was hard, it proved not to be impossible.
I spent that whole day with those children. They were very intelligent children. Coming from various states and cultures, children happily studied and played together with each other even though they didn’t know each other’s languages. In the afternoon, they got hot meals that were supplied from the government through the Akshaya Patra organization. They all ate together. Before coming back in the evening, I spoke to some of their parents who had just come in from work. They expressed great happiness at having this Tent School facility. They are happy that the children are studying and not wasting their time and that it will help them in re-joining schools in their native places. More importantly than that, some mothers stated that they are able to work without the worry of children’s safety. Since they left their children alone in the tents, they had always been stressed about their children’s safety but now they are working rest assured that they are in a safe place.
At the time of the completion of construction work when the migrant workers are going to leave for their native places, the education department there gives them a migration certificate. With the help of that, the children can attend schools in their native places. There is no need for their studies to be halted. It was such a great program. If only there was some thought and a little bit of integrity, the goal of education for all wasn’t so impossible after all!
Bharathi Kode