By V. Vijayalakshmi, IANS
Pune : Twelve-year-old Tanuja looks way older than her age. She is the eldest daughter of parents who are construction workers.
She has to cook and sweep besides baby-sit her three younger siblings, as her mother and father have to leave home early and return late in the evening. And Tanuja may never have got a chance to go to school but for the Door Step School.
Now she is in Class 1, thanks to the school at her doorstep – an initiative of 72-year-old Rajni Paranjpe that is helping educate hundreds of children at various construction sites in Pune and Mumbai.
“Educating children is very importance because adult illiteracy is very difficult to handle,” says Rajni Paranjpe, founder of Door Step School.
Two decades ago, as head of the research department at the College of Social Sciences in Mumbai, Paranjpe had often wondered how to educate the kids of construction workers who have to travel from one site to another with their parents. That’s when she was got the idea of taking the school right to the site itself.
Paranjpe came up with the first Door Step School in Mumbai in 1988 and now has moved to Pune as well. Today the school is teaching 25,000 kids at various construction sites in the two cities.
“In 2004-2005, we did a study and found that nearly 5,000 children in the age group of 5 to 15 at 400 construction sites in the city were not attending school.”
The Door Step School functions a little differently from regular institutions.
“We erect a tin shed at the construction site so that the kids do not have to travel long distances, then we inform the parents about the school.
“Most of the time the parents are ready. If there is a small sibling because of which the child is not able to attend school, we provide childcare facilities for them,” said Paranjpe.
The school – which now covers most of the construction sites in the city and admits children as young as three – also provides books and basic stationery.
Door Step School provides the kids with a platform and gives them a good foundation to prepare them for a municipal school. If need be, it even provides transportation to children to reach a nearby municipal school.
“We do not want to be a parallel school, the idea is that kids under any circumstances should not miss school,” said Paranjpe.
The teachers of Door Step School are educated at least up to Class 10 and are trained according to the needs of the school. The children are taught basic subjects like mathematics, science, social studies in the Marathi medium.
Says Poonam Mundara, coordinator, Door Step School, Study Centre: “We have a different kind of classroom. In one class itself, children of different age groups sit – there are some kids who have never attended school at all. It takes a while to get them into a discipline.”
Door Step School wants to now spread its net. On an average the kids get to stay not more than six months at one school. So if the school has more branches the possibility of getting a child to another centre is more.
“The result of our effort will be visible only two or three generations down. Right now we are just sowing the seeds, the change will be visible much later,” Paranjpe said.