Learning life lessons on a pavement in Gurugram

A honking truck, an ambling stray dog and a middle-aged man speaking loudly on his phone—these are some of the distractions students of Jestha Primary Free school

A honking truck, an ambling stray dog and a middle-aged man speaking loudly on his phone—these are some of the distractions students of Jestha Primary Free school have to deal with during their three-hour-long classes on the Sector 53/56 divider road. Due to the absence of walls, the street school may look like an encroachment on the service lane next to Jal Vayu Towers in Sector 56; but the fact that it imparts basic education to nearly 150 children between the ages of five and 16 years has helped it survive for the past eight years.

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In a clearing along the service lane, close to 40 students sit on rugs in the afternoon sun, some of them clothed in matching red cardigans that were distributed this winter to give a semblance of a uniform. Opposite them rests a green board on an easel. Shefali, on her first day at the school, is doodling dress designs in her notebook. She shows them to her neighbour Rupa, who has been attending the school for the past 10 days. They timidly look up when the teacher asks everyone to pull out their notebooks.

The students come from nearby slums in sectors 56 and 53. They don’t follow a set syllabus, but there is a certain amount of knowledge they need so they don’t have to use their thumbprints as signatures.

“We have a 7-year-old student who knows all the days of the week and a 15-year-old who does not even know the English alphabet. Every student, regardless of their age, has different needs and levels of knowledge. They all need to be attended to differently,” Kanchan Shukla, a Wazirabad resident who teaches at the school, says. As she speaks, a student flashes a chequered notebook with the numerals 1-20 written in words. He is waiting for Shukla to validate his efforts.

Some of the lessons taught are oral and written English alphabets, numbers, months of the year, seasons, fruits, geography, and basic mathematics like addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. The aim is to get the children literate enough to enrol into government schools nearby. Every year, the school manages to get around 10 students enrolled in these government schools. Some have even gone on to study in reputed private schools under the Economically Weaker Section (EWS) quota.

Classes at the school are held in two batches—one at 10am and the other at 2pm—from Monday to Friday. Saturdays are devoted to co-curricular activities such as art, dance, and sports. Each batch comprises about 60 students. They arrive in groups or are dropped by parents and grandparents on their way to work. The parents mostly work as daily wagers and are from West Bengal and Bihar.

“The school aims to keep the students from getting into child labour, rag picking, anti-social activities, etc. When they are here, their parents know that their children are safe and are learning,” Diwakar Gupta, a landlord from Jind who founded the school in 2008, says. He currently employs eight teachers at the school. From time to time, skill workshops for sewing and drawing mehendi are also held.

Gupta and his team of teachers and volunteers are not foreign to the varied issues the students face. Every day, there is a possibility of a few students not turning up at the school as they get lured into providing labour for menial income due to poverty at home, he says.

Indicating Akash, a tall 15-year-old dance enthusiast, RK Verma, a retired Air Force officer and volunteer at the school, says, “His brother found work at a hotel recently. We tried to convince him to attend the school on multiple occasions, but he refused. Similarly, over the years we have encountered cases of children giving up on school in favour of rag-picking, where they get paid as little as ₹2 for a kilogram of plastic collected. The parents’ loss of employment in the city and the consequent return to their hometowns also results in students getting pulled out of school.”

The school offers lunch to students during the morning shift. It is donated done by one of Gupta’s friends. Twice a week, a milkman distributes cups of milk, bananas or bread. Gupta maintains that he does not seek funding or donations, but if people come forward to donate, they are accepted.

In summer, the students will move to a makeshift tarpaulin set-up. A few fans may also be added, Gupta says. But for now, the sun makes the classes easy.

A student gets up with a request to go to the tin bathroom. Shukla entertains the request only after the boy spells out 19. “You have to make them interested in studies before they can study,” Shukla says.