Closing ashram schools is no solution: Sinha
Category :
City |
Posted Date :
10/08/2011
NAGPUR: A day after she and her team escaped a Naxal firing narrowly in Dhanora tehsil of Gadchiroli district, Shantha Sinha, chairperson of the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights, is unperturbed. "It was essential to tour the village. Our visit to the interior village in a conflict zone ensured that the district administration reached out to the people perhaps for the first time," Sinha told TOI on Tuesday.
Sinha, along with NCPCR team members Venkat Reddy, Dipa Dixit, Gunjan Wadhwa, S K Ravi, was accompanied by state tribal commissioner Sambhajirao Sarkunde, Gadchiroli collector Abhishek Krishna and several district officials. They were returning after visiting Kamangad village bordering Chhattisgarh when Naxalites opened fire on their convoy. On Tuesday, in the city on their return journey to New Delhi, an unfazed Sinha and her teammates said the visit to the village where residents were protesting against closure of an ashram shala (a residential school for tribals) was worth their effort.
"The state tribal commissioner Sarkunde, who took the trouble of joining us all the way from Nashik, has assured us that the school will be reopened at the same village in about a month's time after the contract with the old school management is terminated and other formalities are completed," said Sinha.
The education society running the ashram school at the picturesque Kamangad had, for some reasons, decided to shut the school and relocate it at Kurkheda, some 100km away. "This move had greatly disturbed residents of Kamangad and villagers of six to seven nearby villages who sent their children to the special residential schools for tribals. We could interact with the people and listen to their woes. Their angst and the children's eagerness to get education was inspiring," said Dixit.
Fact remains that the condition of ashramshalas in the state is pitiable. Last year, the then tribal commissioner Uttam Khobrgade had told media that most of these tribal schools were violating children's rights by making them live in horrible conditions. The schools did not have basic amenities and even separate accommodation for boys and girls, Khobragade had said. Asked about this, Sinha admitted that the situation was bad. The 100-odd such schools in the tribal dominated Gadchiroli were running at less than 50% capacity with students dropping out, she said.
"But then, closing down of such schools when education is now a fundamental right amounts to cynicism. That cannot be a solution to the problem in a progressive state like Maharashtra where 9% (Rs 4000 crore) of the state's total budget is allocated to education of tribals," she stressed.
That was the reason the NCPCR team decided to visit Kamangad, so that the administration is moved to act. Incidentally, it was also found that the school management surpassed the Nagpur office of the assistant tribal commissioner and even got waived from Mumbai conditions like getting gram panchayat approval for closure of the school. Thanks to the proactive action of the NCPCR, the school will be started again in the same village and this time it will be run by the government, Sinha said.
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