Abstract

Dantewada, a district with two-third tribal population and one of the lowest literacy rates in the country, sees a large number of students dropouts at every level of school education. It is however important to address the issue of dropouts among teenagers because of their inclination to join the conflict prevalent in the region between the state and the Naxalites. A unique experiment was therefore carried out to re-enroll such drop-out students back to schools and allow them to learn agriculture through practical ways on the basis of curriculum prescribed by the text-books and connected with the natural resources available in the region. The paper would narrate the journey of this initiative and present a tentative structure on how school education could be remodeled on the basis of forest and agriculture based school education in tribal areas.

Introduction

Dantewada, a district situated in south-Chhattisgarh, is part of the the Bastar region which is inhabited mostly by tribal communities such as the Gonds (Muria, Madia), Bhatra, Paraja and Dorala. Earlier the district comprised of the entire south-Bastar region which included the districts of Bijapur and Sukma too. Currently it is divided into four development blocks namely, Dantewada, Geedam, Katekalyan and Kuwakonda.

Education wise, Dantewada was the least educated district in the country with just 30 percent literacy in the year 2001. The situation did improve a little within the last 15 years and the literacy rates rose to 42 percent as reported in the 2011 census. In 2015, there were 1047 schools in the district in which 49,413 students (26,636 boys, 22,777 girls) were enrolled at elementary level and 10,891 students (5,640 boys and 5,251 girls) were enrolled in high and higher secondary schools.

From the 1980s onwards, the district has been an active site for Naxalite mobilization which did result in a period of intense civil strife against them from the year 2005 to 2009 in the form of a movement called Salwa Judum. During the time of civil strife, i.e. Salwa Judum, close to 200 schools were either destroyed or shut down by the Naxalites as part of their policy to target all the permanent structures in the villages. This was done by them to make sure that the local police and paramilitary forces do not stay in those school buildings during their combing operations and turn them into permanent camps with automatic weapons being established on the roof the school buildings. This ultimately led to massive displacement of schools and its students to villages situated next to a motorable road accessible to government and its employees.

In response to the crisis situation, the district administration came up with the idea of establishing Portable Cabin (PC) residential schools made out of bamboo sheets. The structures have a capacity to take close to 500 students each. They were easy to establish and Naxalites did not have any objection to them as they were devoid of any pucca (concrete/permanent) roof, which meant that no heavy weapons could be installed over them. As of now there are 17 such portable residential schools functioning in the district. Although these portable cabin residential schools are mandated to provide elementary education, many of these schools were later upgraded to higher secondary schools.

This is crucial for the children because Dantewada faces a high dropout rate at primary and upper-primary level. According to the District Information System for Education data less than 25 percent of children who enroll in class I are able to reach class VIII. The dropout rate even after class VIII is again very high and is a reason for concern primarily because of two reasons. Firstly, the basic qualification to take up a police job is standard X education across the state. This criterion has been relaxed to standard VIII for recruitment in Bastar, especially for the newly raised Bastar Battalion, a paramilitary force of local tribal boys and girls raised especially to fight Naxalites. Secondly, recruitment by Naxalites also generally takes place between the ages of 14 and 16, the age at which children would be in class IX and X. Thus the teenager faces the dual risk of being acquired for a life-threatening job without being particularly aware of it while joining it.

According to the statistics provided by the district administration and trends observed on the field, it has been found that the enrollment ratio is quite good for students who pass out from standard VIII and more than 90 percent students were able to enroll for class IX. This could become possible because of pro-active measures taken by the district education department which included sending the child’s transfer certificate (TC) to the nearest high school so as to ensure that he/she can be tracked. Students were also found to be aware about the next school they were supposed to go to and were found to be scouting for the best possible options for themselves. However, an acute problem of dropouts was found after students enrolled in class IX.

Enrollment of students in High and Higher Secondary Schools

(Source: District Education Officer, Dantewada)

Year/Class	2013-14			2014-15
	Boys	Girls	Total	Boys	Girls	Total
IX	2075	1750	3825	2256	1976	4232
X	1663	1461	3124	1442	1414	2856
XI	1011	948	1959	1039	981	2020
XII	726	619	1345	903	880	1783
Total	5475	4778	10253	5460	5251	10891

If one looks at the above-mentioned figures, it is clear that the number of boys and girls in standard IX in year 2013–14 who should get enrolled in standard X in 2014–15 came down drastically from 3,825 to 2,856. Thus 25 percent out of the total students who enrolled in class IX dropped out of school. The same is the case during the transition period from standard X to XI during which 35 percent students dropped out of school.

While analyzing these figures one has to keep in the mind that the figures also contain those students who fail and repeat a particular class. They form a large number, but their exact statistics is currently not available. According to the rules of Chhattisgarh Board of Secondary Education a child who has fails continuously twice in a particular class cannot be allowed to continue as a regular student.

They dropped out mid-way for several reasons. Due to no detention policy implemented under the Right to Education Act, teachers at the primary and middle levels were found to have abdicated their responsibility to teach. Teachers felt that a child will have to be promoted to the next standard irrespective of their teaching efforts. Even in middle schools, where subject specific teachers are available, teachers often give up on their responsibility of teaching foundational material to students at such advanced levels by blaming primary school teachers for not creating the base for students.

There are several reasons for this poor learning among children. One of the primary ones is that most of these students come from Gondi language speaking families. Gondi belongs to the Dravidian family of languages and has very few similarities with Hindi. Thus when a child is taught by teachers from the Hindi heartland, who do not have any understanding of the children’s local language, the children fail to learn anything in the classroom. This leads to a process where a teacher cannot understand what the child is trying to say and the child hardly understands the language of the teacher. What we then see is that children in middle schools (i.e. classes VI to VIII) are hardly able to read simple Hindi, which is the mode of teaching in government schools. This not only affects their language learning, their comprehension of other subjects especially math and science gets significantly affected too. Thus illiterate students are being produced after eight long years of elementary education training and when they take exams in the IX standard, where failure means detention in the same class, they find it hard to digest and this leads to many students dropping out.

Ideally, the State Council for Education Research and Training (SCERT) should work in the field of providing multi-lingual education to these children. However, they have been able to develop only some basic text material for primary class students and have introduced a few chapters in the local language in Hindi textbooks for students from class III to class VIII. The chapters are mostly in the Gondi language but written using the Devanagari script and therefore feels like an exercise in futility when children are hardly able to read the basic text.

This shows in the form of poor learning standards of students and reflects in their performance in standard IX where children fail in almost all the subjects during the initial few months. The reason behind this is that children are not able to grasp the complicated concepts prescribed in the syllabus of standard IX. They therefore lose motivation to learn and feel alienated from the rest of the class thereby dropping out before the end of the year. Also, the high schools in the district are quite few in number and the geographical distance to them from the children’s village pose a great barrier for even those students who are interested in studying. Some students also drop out because of the lack of hostel facilities in nearby schools. Personal reasons, such as crisis in the family or poor economic conditions, also lead to students dropping out of schools.

What can be said for sure that not a single drop out student was found to be missing and said to have joined the Naxals. Thus, at least in Dantewada, the hypothesis that students drop out to join Naxals turned out to be false. However, many of the students were found to be missing school for several weeks so as to train for joining the Bastar Battalion. Some of these students later left their studies once they were selected for the battalion.

Therefore as part of a fellowship program which ran from June 2015 to May 2017, I initiated a fieldwork to re-enroll these teenage drop out students, mostly in between the ages of 14 and 18, so as to ensure that these students continue their schooling and be in a position to make relevant choices on the basis of an understanding they develop during a course of liberal education.

Tracking Dropout Students

According to the prevalent definition of a drop out is a child who does not go to school continuously for two months. There is however no mechanism to find out how many students drop out each year. When we tried to procure this information from the district administration, they did hand over to us the information they collect every year in a particular format. There is however great discrepancy in data, which was given to us, and what was found out in the field visits made to 11 schools on the basis of it. Thus, the departmental data being unreliable was given up in favor of field level data.

The drop out students were approached by going to their villages and convincing them about continuing their school education. Those who agreed and were tried to be re-enrolled at the nearest school found that the system was quite adversarial in admitting these students (especially those who had missed at least one year of schooling). This was primarily because these government schools were anyhow hardly being able to cope with the pressure of existing regular students due to limited resources available at their disposal. Teachers therefore found it difficult to digest the idea of admitting a student who had lost touch with regular forms of education. They were skeptical about whether he/she would be able to keep pace with the regular students. Despite all these difficulties around 30 dropout tribal students were admitted to schools in two years.

Soon some of these students began dropping out again. The reason being that they felt stifled among their peers who were far ahead in their classroom, learning by virtue of being regular students. The dropouts also could not relate themselves to the curriculum being taught because of the one-year gap from their previous learning. However, one of the most important factors was that they could simply not study because they did not know how to read and write. This led to them failing in their classroom tests and semester examinations. This led to a sense of social shame and strongly undermined their confidence level.

An Agricultural Solution to the Dropout Problem

Thus a form of education, which could overcome the barriers of reading and writing, was required. And the answer to that was not far. The district administration already runs a program called Introduction to Basic Technology (IBT) with the help of an organisation called Vigyan Ashram based in Pune. It imparts skills training in four trades: home and health, workshop, electrical and agriculture. Although designed for class IX and X students, the program was being run for from class VI to VIII in all the 17 portable cabin schools of the district due to limited funding options.

A close observation of the program led to the conclusion that agricultural trade was functioning far more successfully than others. The reasons were multiple, but the primary one was that boys and girls of tribal communities, who essentially grow up among the forest, find it natural to connect with plants and animals. And that was the kind of education they wanted which told them more about the resources they were already in possession of.

Thus began a basic search to provide vocational education in the form of agriculture. Surprisingly, there were seven schools in the district, which offered agriculture as a subject, just like science and commerce, in class XI and XII. Most of the schools had initiated the subject because of an administrator’s efforts towards promoting agriculture in the region. What the administrator couldn’t do was to provide agriculture teachers in these schools.

An opportunity was seen there and a project was launched to turn agriculture into a subject, which could be taught practically without the necessity of specialised reading and writing skills. The project was initiated in seven schools of Dantewada which had a total of approximately 650 students in class XI and XII who had opted to study agriculture, or rather were assigned to study agriculture as teachers automatically preferred their top students to pursue science and the remaining were distributed among agriculture and art.

As a first step, the district administration was pursued to hire fresh Bachelor of Science in Agriculture graduates as contractual temporary teachers. These graduates took up the mantle of teaching the basic curriculum prescribed by the state government. In addition, they were asked to develop a farm within the school premises so that students could do practical experiments about what they were learning in the classroom. They were also encouraged to take students for field visits so as to identify various varieties of paddy grown around in the area and the pests, which attack them. On the basis of their observations students then made a scrapbook (herbarium).

Thereafter a basic agriculture laboratory was set up in all the schools by providing them with basic items required for day-to-day field work. The Principals and agriculture teachers were authorised to make the purchase according to the requirement of their schools. This led to a lot of equipment being purchased according to the capacity of the agriculture teachers to use them.

Apart from the local initiative, various government departments of district administration such as agriculture, fisheries, veterinary, sericulture, Krishi Vigyan Kendra (agricultural extension centres created by ICAR (Indian Council for Agricultural Research), Kshir Sagar (milk processing centre), departments, agriculture engineering departments, and few Non Goverenmental Organisatiions (NGOs) working in the field of agriculture and education such as Bachpan Banao, Nirmaan and Vigyan Ashram were also roped in.

These organisations facilitated students’ visit to their project sites. Horticulture and forest departments were also approached but their partnership could not lead to any definite collaboration due to several constrains ranging from lack of availability of trainers to projects being on hold during the students’ learning cycle.

A brief description of the project sites visited by students is as follows:

Veterinary hospital:

Students visit the veterinary hospital nearest to their school where doctors introduced them to instruments used by them during day-to-day operations. This mostly includes those used in the treatment of cows such as teat siphon, trocar and cannula, Burdizzo castrator, dehorner, etc. Doctors also inform them about various diseases in animals such as cows, pigs, hens, goats and common vaccines and medicines used in their treatments. The students listen in rapt attention and often raise questions about the diseases they have seen in their cows, pigs and hens. Their curiosity often ranges from the best variety of cocks for fights to the reasons behind mass deaths of cows. The department also provides students with colorful charts of various breeds of all the animals and common diseases affecting them. They are also told about various schemes being run by the department giving students an option to avail help of those, in case if they drop out.

Silkworm rearing centre:

The Deputy Director of the Sericulture department and Senior Silk inspector teach students about the life cycle of silkworms. Students visit the silkworm rearing centre and see various stages of growth, right from the egg stage to larva, pupa and moth and witness the process of how a cocoon is prepared by a caterpillar. Students also get to see the stifling of pupa in a hot air chamber. They learn how grading of cocoons is done on the basis of their cell weight and how they are then priced. At the end the students visit the reeling centre in Narayanpur (200 kilometres from Dantewada) to understand the process of removing thread silk threads from the cocoon. In the process they are imparted with the information that their forests are homes to some of the rare varieties of silk worms in the world, which produce a variety of silk limited to the region.

Poultry farm:

Tribal students who have seen mostly indigenous chickens at their house visit the only poultry farm operational in the district. A detailed presentation on rearing broiler chicks, right from being brought from 500 kilometres away from the Balaghat district to the farm and being sold in the market, is given to them by the owner of poultry farm. An accompanying veterinary doctor from the animal husbandry department also explains various vaccines given to chicks at regular intervals. Students are also told about identification markers of various diseases by looking at their symptoms.

Students then visit the poultry farm and have a close look at feeders, water-dispensers and bedding kept in the poultry shed. They are told about the direction in which the rooms should be constructed and ways to keep the temperature under control during summers and winters. Students also learn about the cost of construction of poultry farm and steps to follow to make it viable. This way they learn a bit about entrepreneurship when they were told that the department had sanctioned that 40 such poultry farms but only one could succeed. This was because of the integrated farming approach of the owner who grew the animal feed in his farm and reared fish simultaneously so as to cut cost and also use his resources in a sustainable manner. The doctor simultaneously informs students about various schemes of the department related to poultry farming and how they could benefit from them.

Dairy farm:

Doctors of the veterinary department explain the animal anatomy of Jersey and Holstein Friesian cows along with indigenous Sahiwal breed to students. They are told about growing Napier grass and Azolla as fodder for the animals. Under the integrated farm management, students learn about rearing cows, goats, hens and fish simultaneously. In one of the dairy farms, students are able to see Sehore and Jamunapari breeds of goats too which are reared across India for their meat and milk and also because of their good resistance to diseases.

Milk processing centre:

Students visit the only milk processing unit in the district and learn about the idea of co-operative milk production. Students under the expert guidance see processes such as chilling, pasteurization, homogenization and packaging of milk. They also learn the process of making paneer (cottage cheese), khoa, rabri and lassi through live demonstrations by the employees there.

Although there is no practice of milking a cow in tribal culture, the government has been distributing cows to be milked for commercial purposes. These cows are however finding it hard to survive given the difficult temperatures and climate conditions of the region and require extreme maintenance. Students learn these and know more about artificial insemination technique so as to cross breed their cows with better variety of bulls.

Agriculture engineering implements:

The focus is on teaching students about three mechanized farm implements: cultivator, mould board plough and rotavator. This is because these they are easily available with the farmers due to being distributed by the government under their Mocho Badi (paddy field fencing) scheme. Also, they are quite useful while growing paddy and vegetables. Students also get to see field demonstrations of reaper and disk harrow, wherever they are available.

Preparing jam, jelly and sauce:

Boys and girls were trained in making apple jam, guava jelly and tomato sauce by a trainer from the NGO, Vigyan Ashram (Pune) who is stationed in Dantewada. Students measure the contents during each process from the beginning till end and take out the cost of preparing jam, jelly and sauce from one kilogram of apple, guava and tomato respectively. This process teaches them about post-harvest processing and storage techniques, which can very well be used for local products such as tamarind which is found in plenty.

Organic farming:

To ensure local knowledge sharing, a farmer or rural agriculture extension officer (RAEO) of the Agriculture department of the local village gives training to students in preparation of Jeevamrut (micro-organism multiplier), Beejamrut (seed treatment medicine) and Handi dawa (pot medicine). This ensures that the farmer shares his personal experience with students and instils confidence about the reliability of these preparations in regular use. System of Rice Intensification (SRI) method is also shown to students through which paddy production can be increased without any addition of chemical fertilizers. Through this process parents also get to know that their students are learning about the best practices prevalent locally and they too provide their input in application of traditional knowledge.

School assignment:

A small portion of farmland was given to the students in groups and seeds such as mustard, kusum, wheat, maize, brinjal, tomato, carrot, radish, bottle-gourd, bitter-gourd, onion, green chillies, etc. were provided to them through Krishi Vigyan Kendra and Agriculture department. Students saw some of the seeds and their varieties for the first time and it was a wonder for them to see such plants grow. Once grown, they also marketed their produce within the school campus. It helped them learn the practice of trade.

Students were also asked to collect local varieties of paddy seeds so as to understand their physical differences and also to be ready to use them for field demonstrations the following year. The process of seed collection has made them aware of several traditional varieties, which are sown according to the local climate conditions. With the help of the NGO Nirmaan, students were also shown more than 40 varieties of paddy seeds collected from within the district itself. They were amazed to know about the variety and the fact that Bastar region is home to more than 15,000 varieties of paddy.

Krishi Vigyan Kendra (KVK):

Students get a synopsis of all the departments in KVK and get to see:

1. Exhibition centre: The students do have a look at various exhibits such as stages of lac production, processed items such as sindoor (vermilion), kosara (Provide the English equivalent), rice, tikhur (Provide the English equivalent), honey, etc., along with multiple seed varieties of paddy, pulses, and oilseeds. This gives them a glimpse of how the produce from their forests are processed and marketed.

2. Green house: The role of the green house in keeping the temperature regulated and use of drip-irrigation in conserving water is seen by students on the capsicum plant. Students relate this to the green house effect provided by their natural forest, which are important to trap heat.

3. Mushroom production centre: Training for the production of oyster mushroom is regularly held by KVK and therefore students get to see mushrooms at various stages of its growth. They are also informed about the process for its commercial production. By seeing this students get an idea about how they can similarly grow a wide variety of mushrooms, which grow naturally in their forests.

4. Agriculture engineering equipment: Paddy sowing machine, seed grader, tikhur processing machine, chiraunji (Buchanania lanzan) processing machine, rotavator, cultivator, mould board plough, disk harrow, potato slicer, etc., are some of the implements students get to know about at the centre. They are encouraged to think about utilising this equipment in their farms as most of the tribes do have large land holdings, which they are hardly able to cultivate due to limited manpower available at their disposal.

5. Soil Testing laboratory: Under the national scheme to provide soil health card to farmers, the district soil testing laboratory has been mandated to test around 16 types of minerals. Students learn about various machines used in the testing process and are told about the process of collecting soil samples. They come to know about the suitability of other crops, apart from millets and rice in their land.

6. Vermicompost: Fertilizers made by decomposing organic material by earthworms is seen by students. Side-by-side they also see the production of Azolla culture, which is a good source of protein for young animals. Through this students understand the link between the fertility of their soil and various factors, which aid it.

7. Black Bengal goat: Students study the anatomy of the goat and learn about making an ideal structure for their rearing and upkeep.

8. Kadaknath hens: Known to be a rare breed found mostly in Jhabua district, these hens have been brought to Dantewada so as to give them to farmers under a local scheme. It is a matter of curiosity for them to see black eggs and black meat of this special hen.

9. Rabi crop: Various crops such as those of pulses, oilseeds, cereals planted by KVK for their breeding programs is seen by students during the farm visit. They are able to connect with the process of seed selection through segregation of best and unadulterated varieties so as to be able to use them for the next season. They also get exposure to inter-cropping of horticulture corps being undertaken of fruit plants such as mango and pomegranate and get an idea about how they facilitate the growth of each other.

10. Career guidance: At the end of their visit students are guided by subject matter specialists (SMS) of KVK in their respective fields on how to prepare for entrance examinations of pre-agriculture tests and are motivated to pursue higher studies in the field of agriculture. Students would be encouraged to apply for agriculture entrance examination taken by Indian Council for Agriculture research and state agriculture university.

Conclusion:

The impact of all these initiatives was quite significant in providing practical education to students who struggle to read and write. What was a visible sign was that the demand for field visits increased drastically, quite clearly showing the interest of students in learning things practically. The field visits also enabled tribal students, who are generally deemed shy by non-tribals because of their lack of communication skills, to turn curious and become much more confident to ask questions without any hesitation. Their attendance in classes also improved quite significantly and their performances in class XII board exams also improved with all schools recording 90 percent and above pass percentage. This although cannot be directly attributed to the initiative, but played an important role in brining about a transformation.

Thus, more vocational courses like these in the fields of agro-forestry are required for teenagers so as to give them meaningful exposure to the kind of education, which could be of any practical use. This kind of vocational education integrated with curricular teaching can also address the huge number of dropouts in the region and reduce the participation of youths in the conflict to a large extent.

References:

• Annual Work Plan & Budget (2010­–11) Appraisal Report, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, Chhattisgarh Government
• Census of India (2001) Office of The Registrar General and Census Commissioner, New Delhi
• Census of India (2011) Office of The Registrar General and Census Commissioner, New Delhi
• District Information System for Education (2005–2011) <http://dise.in/>
• Jain, Prakhar. 2015. Impact of conflict between Salwa Judum and Naxalites on school education. Master of Arts in Social Work dissertation. Mumbai: Tata Institute of Social Sciences.
• Scheduled Areas and Scheduled Tribes Commission (1960–61). Government of India.
• Tiwari, Shivkumar and Sharma, Shrikamal. 2009. (eighth edition). Madhya Pradesh ki Janjatiyan (Samaj evam Vyavastha). Madhya Pradesh: Hindi Granth Akadami.

Vigyan Ashram. <vigyanashram.com>