By Mahesh Trivedi, TwoCircles.net
Gujarat: There are 35,000 schools in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state of Gujarat but J P High School located in a communally sensitive area of old Ahmedabad stands out of the pack for waiving 7 months of school fee from poor students.
At a time when almost all schools have jacked up their fees, the 47-year-old school in Dariapur has waived seven months’ first-term fees amounting to some Rs 2,500 each (1.1 million INR in total) for the 350-odd students of Class I to Class VIII.
The compassionate gesture has lifted a huge weight off the shoulders of poverty-stricken and cash-starved middle-class parents who have been struggling to make both ends meet ever since businesses went to ruin after the deadly coronavirus struck in March.
Muslim-dominated Dariapur, which boasts several marvellous Mughal monuments, soon turned out to be one of the worst-affected localities in early April with the result that it was put under a strict lockdown which brought the economic activity to a grinding halt.
Most of the down-at-heel residents are daily wagers, labourers, electricians, plumbers, mechanics and rickshaw drivers who were forced to remain at home twiddling their thumbs for weeks on end and barely managing to survive.
“How can we expect them to pay the school fees of their wards when many of them did not have even two nickels to rub together? Our trustees spared a thought for the worried parents and, on June 5, we decided to waive the April-to-October fees of primary students,” managing trustee Jitu Shah (72) told TwoCircles.net.
A car mechanic namely Said Usman Gani said that “Many parents like me were hard-pressed and were just thinking of pulling out our children from the school. This would have ruined their future. But thanks to the fee waiver, we have now heaved a sigh of relief.”
While senior Congress leader Arjun Modhwadia told this correspondent that J P High School had proved to be a torch-bearer for other schools which had remained closed since the last week of March, Dariapur legislator Gyasuddin Shaikh said that Shah’s school, by waiving the first-term fees, had written a glorious chapter in the history of education in Gujarat.
Indeed, as Gujarat earned the dubious distinction of having the highest mortality rate in the pandemic, at least 20 schools took a leaf out of Shah’s book and promptly announced fee exemptions for one to four months. With parents up in arms against the fee hike, even education minister Bhupendra Chudasama was critical of school owners, many of them politicians of different hues.
This is not the first time that J P High School has done this. Whether it was students’ Navnirman agitation in 1974, anti-reservation agitations in 1981 and 1985 or the bloody communal riots in 2002, the Shah-led school management rose to the occasion and provided succour or shelter to hundreds of affected residents of Dariapur, which turned into a tinderbox of anger during disturbances.
Even during the 1973 floods and 1983 drought, the school’s students, 80 per cent of them Muslims, passed round the hat among citizens and distributed funds to the needy. Times out of number, teachers and students have taken out rallies around Dariapur to create awareness about saving water, growing trees, keeping surroundings clean, saving the girl child, etc.
Not surprisingly, several of its alumni are today top-drawer municipal officials, doctors and businessmen.
Shahnawaz Sheikh, general manager at a showroom of a prestigious company in Gandhinagar, told TwoCircles.net, “I got goosebumps when I came to know that my alma mater had read poor parents’ mind and waived fees during these tough times.”
Irshad Abdul Sattar Shaikh, a headteacher in a government school in Vadodara, went down memory lane and recalled the dedicated teachers of J P High School, Sanat Sastry said he was proud to have studied in a school whose trustees had a golden heart to lend a helping hand to down-and-out parents and make sure that their children did not discontinue their studies.
Naresh Shah, who has been taking up cudgels for aggrieved parents as president of the All-Gujarat Parents’ Association, told TwoCircles.net that the Gujarat government should loosen its purse strings and spend for education from its Rs 270-million budget.
“J P High School has set an example for others. The state administration should come out with a Government Resolution and throw the book at greedy and guilty school managements,” he summed up.
