By Vichitra Sharma, IANS
Ganeshpuri (Uttar Pradesh) : The stately palace of Raja Digraj Singhji of Ramnagar, still resplendent with traditional carvings but chipped and mildewed, was once home to royal princesses. Now the building houses a school for the poorest of poor girls from neighbouring villages.
Under the National Programme of Education of Girls at the Elementary Level (NPEGEL), the palace on the banks of a river is run as a residential school for underprivileged girls from villages within a radius of about 50 km, reports Grassroots Features.
There are 81 girls enrolled in the school with a capacity of 100. Teachers went house to house to enrol either dropouts or those who have never been to school before. It took almost seven to eight weeks of persuasion before the guardians agreed to send their wards.
“At first they were apprehensive. They wanted to know why we were collecting girls in one place. Would we be misusing them was a concern that was bothering them,” said Pushpa Tripathy, the warden.
At first sight, the building looks like a private middleclass boarding school – with clean classrooms and dormitories. Animated interactions are held in classrooms located in corners that were probably private spaces in a bygone era.
There are squeals of laughter as another class recites poems under a mango tree. The girls are neatly dressed in blue and white salwar kameez and betray none of the misery, deprivation or the debilitating poverty that they were born into.
It is only during the silence of the evening that a quiet tear is shed. When Shivani Mishra let out a muffled sob, two or three girls immediately rushed to console her.
“She is crying because she is thinking of her mother, wondering how her family is coping at home,” said Shivani’s classmate Sudha Rathore.
Sudha’s father is an alcoholic truck driver who disappears for months without bothering to send any money. There are days when she has gone without a single meal. It’s her 13-year-old brother who supports the family of four, including the mother. He works in a small restaurant in Lucknow, cleaning utensils.
According to the warden, on a couple of occasions her father has come to the school in a drunken state and demanded that the girl be handed over to him.
Here, girls are considered a curse and are called “balu” (cattle feed in the local language), meaning that they are fodder for the society, the warden added.
It is little wonder then that the young girls are conditioned to have a mental block towards education. Often a newcomer pleads to the teacher in local dialect: “Madamji hum ka kitab na diyo, hum na par paye.” (Please don’t give me the book; I’ll not be able to read).
The head teacher, Manju Verma, said: “I was the only teacher when the school started two years ago. These children had picked up bad behaviour from fathers who were alcoholic and abusive, brothers who gambled, and violence from their poverty-stricken hovels. The girls would use filthy abusive language, pull each other’s hair, spit all over the place and throw garbage everywhere.”
But the worst was that these girls were not trained to use a toilet and preferred to relieve themselves in the open, in the front lawn. If it was cold or raining outside, the dormitory floor was good enough. Pages from a textbook would be used to cover it.
They would have to be forced into the bathrooms because they didn’t want to wash themselves or their clothes with soap. It was an uphill task to make them address each other politely.
Conditions are far better now.
The senior girls work out a roster for cleaning the hostel rooms, bathrooms, kitchen and so on. Each dormitory (rooms with six to 12 beds) has a captain to monitor it.
The change in these girls is dramatic. Now the older girls don’t want to share their rooms with new girls as they find them dirty and smelly.
Thinking of home and poverty, Shivani whispered, almost like a prayer: “Ma’am, I am truly privileged to be here, am I not?”
The silence in the room said it all.