Hit by the double whammy of poverty and disability, no one in Kalim Pasha’s family ever thought he would receive education like other children till a Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) volunteer came knocking at his home in Mysore in 2007.
Hit by the double whammy of poverty and disability, no one in Kalim Pasha’s family ever thought he would receive education like other children till a Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) volunteer came knocking at his home in Mysore in 2007.
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A spastic by birth, Kalim can barely stand and his speech is slurred, but he has a sharp mind that can up pick nuances of education fast. “In just a few months, he can count from one to 10, has learnt drawing with the help of crayons and can now express himself,” said his SSA volunteer Shano, who discovered him under a unique SSA project for providing home-based education to 81,900 disabled children in Karnataka.
His favourite pastime now is looking at colourful pictures of animals in his books, and using his crayons to draw. “This boy is amazing. He has a drive to learn despite his disability,” said his mother, who rolls incense sticks for a living.
Hundreds of kilometres away in Rabindra Palli slum cluster in Kolkata, Babiya, who was born paralysed, is going to school thanks SSA. G Chatterjee, the principal of a local SSA school, spotted him in the slum cluster and offered to buy him a wheelchair, from SSA funds, if his mother Savita agreed to send him to school. “With tears in her eyes, she accepted the wheelchair,” Chatterjee said. Now, his father Kamal Das, a vegetable seller, wheels him to school.
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In Madhya Pradesh’s most backward Orcha sub-division, Prachi Ojha recalls how education helped her become a radio jockey in a community radio station, Bundelkhand Radio, launched in October. “There was lot of opposition to my education in my village. I resisted it, saying [astronaut] Kalpana Chawla was also a girl. My parents stood by me and now I am in Class 11, and working alongside,” she said, minutes before going on air. Her father is a landless farmer, who could barely feed his family, but free education helped Ojha pursue her dreams.
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In Madhya Pradesh’s most backward Orcha sub-division, Prachi Ojha recalls how education helped her become a radio jockey in a community radio station, Bundelkhand Radio, launched in October. “There was lot of opposition to my education in my village. I resisted it, saying [astronaut] Kalpana Chawla was also a girl. My parents stood by me and now I am in Class 11, and working alongside,” she said, minutes before going on air. Her father is a landless farmer, who could barely feed his family, but free education helped Ojha pursue her dreams.
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These are just a few of the millions of children who got access to education, courtesy the Rs 50,000-crore SSA, which the World Bank called the world’s most successful school programme.
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In 2007-08, 12.8 million children joined schools, increasing the enrollment to over 210 million, about 96.4 per cent of the child population. The enrollment percentage was 81 in 2001, when the programme started.
To cope with the rush, over 340,000 schools were added over the last five years — almost 30 per cent of the 1.2 million schools in India, a recent report of National University for Educational Planning and Administration said.
However, the programme still has a high dropout rate of 30 per cent. The next goal of the government is to address this.
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.
