Phailin fails to blow away Odisha girls' passion for education

Their homes have been swept away in Phailin winds and the floods. But, some school-going girls in Odisha feel lucky to have saved their books as a precious possession. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Oct 16, 2013, 10:41:33 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, Chatarpur/Balasore

Prefer HTon Google

Share via

Copy link

Their homes have been swept away in Phailin winds and the following floods. But, some school-going girls feel lucky to have saved their books as a precious possession. For them, books saved, is dreams saved.

“Padh kar hi main Priyanka Chopra ki tarah ban sakti haun (I can become someone like Priyanka Chopra only through education),” is how Bhagirathi Saumitra feels about importance of education. This was evident from her efforts to dry her Class 8 textbooks in the sunshine after the cyclone hit her New Podampita village, around 170 km south of Bhubaneswar.

She was not alone. Some more girls could be seen drying up their books along with the grains and fish in the remnants of their homes.

When everyone in her village ran to the other side of a hill for protection from Phailin, Saumitra was busy saving her school books. “We asked her to take some food for the night. She refused and insisted on taking the books,” recalls her father Chandra Balaram, while rebuilding his thatched mud house. When they came back to the ravaged village, Saumitra had a job at hand -- dry the books.

Although poorly ranked in school education, Odisha has made a lot of progress in the social sector, thanks to its girls. The school drop-out rate has witnessed a drop since 2005-04 and the dip has been more among girls than boys.

“The poor have realised that education can provide better lives to their children and here discrimination between girls and boys is not much,” said Debasish Kar, a state government volunteer for mobilising communities for education and empowerment for Ganjam district.

Around 440 kilometre towards north in flood-hit Balasore district, Anita Patra has repeated Saumitra’s act. She collected her wet books when her family abandoned their marooned village to take temporary shelter on the national highway between Kolkata and Chennai. “I have to complete my homework after the Puja holidays. Two days were wasted because of floods,” she said, not distracted by honking trucks on the highway.

In flood affected and Muslim-dominated Gopinathpur village, more girls attend school than boys. These girls speak fluent Hindi and Oriya and read a bit of English too unlike many boys who feel more comfortable with Oriya. “They (girls) are more regular to school than boys,” said a teacher in a local school Krishna Parida, adding that the zest for education is more in girls than boys.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
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.Read More

Get the latest India News, breaking headlines and real-time updates from across the country. Stay informed about politics, government policies, crime, weather and major national developments.