Orissa hostel scheme offers lesson for tribal dists…….Debabrata Mohanty
Clad in a pink petticoat and blouse, Jyoti Paika adjusts a bundle of notebooks in her hands. Her tuition teacher, Gitanjali Behera, asks her to recite the English alphabet. Paika, a tribal girl who studies in Class I, Kendriya Vidyalaya No. 1 at Ambapua of Ganjam district, rattles off the alphabet, missing a couple of letters midway, but quickly correcting herself.
This is no ordinary feat for Paika, who hails from Ankapur village in Sanakhemundi block of Ganjam Chief Minister Naveen Patnaiks home district. Like her impoverished parents, Paika could have been relegated to a life of drudgery and illiteracy. But she, as well as several other tribal children staying in a two-storeyed spacious hostel built by the district administration, now has a chance to dream big. Thanks to a model residential hostel started by the district administration about three years back, these children now have a shot at getting a quality education.
The scheme, a brainchild of Ganjam District Collector V Karthikeyan Pandian, is aimed at filling the reserved seats for tribal boys and girls as well Dalits in two Kendriya Vidyalayas of the district. While each of the KVs have at least 25 seats reserved for tribal children from remote areas could not take advantage of this quota due to lack of residential facilities.
All that is fast changing. There are 107 tribal and a few Dalit students in the hostel, who are all enrolled in the nearby Kendriya Vidyalaya. Around 10 others are studying in another English medium school nearby. The cost of their education, accommodation and food, which adds up to around Rs 800 per month per child, is being borne by the District Red Cross Society while PREM, a local NGO is managing the hostel. Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik is now all set to adopt the scheme for other tribal-dominated districts with Malkangiri and Mayurbhanj district set to replicate it first.
What makes the residential hostel scheme a groundbreaking moment in the states tribal education history is its out-of-the-box thinking. Unlike the faltering 700-odd tribal residential schools with about 3 lakh students, the hostel experiment is an effort to get the tribal students to stay in towns where the quality of education imparted is far better.
Teacher absenteeism is rampant in the residential schools as most of them are located in the forest areas. The whole focus in these schools is on midday meals. After a few years, the students drop out, said Subharanshu Mishra, honorary secretary of Ganjam District Red Cross Society. The tribal literacy rate in Orissa is a meagre 37.37 per cent. For the tribals in the area, who are being eyed as potential recruits by the Maoists, this initiative is a ray of hope.
URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/Orissa-hostel-scheme-offers-lesson-for-tribal-dists/646117
URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/orissa-hostel-scheme-offers-lesson-for-tribal-dists/646117/2