Farm field is their classroom, and rags their desk. In remote villages of Jharkhand’s Left Wing Extremism-affected Palamu district, teachers travel several kilometres every day to impart lessons to children of mostly poor tribal families under the shade of trees, a scene reminiscent of the Gurukuls.
The spread of Covid-19 pandemic forced children indoors in March, and the state Government directed schools to impart lessons to students over WhatsApp. However, more than half of the 340 odd students in Utkramit Madhya Vidyalaya, Ekdari, about 80 kilometers from the Palamu district headquarters, did not have smartphones and were left with no access to teachers. Several hundred students of Rajkiya Madhya Vidyalaya Dangwar and Utkramit Madhya Vidyalaya Hussainabad also did not have access to smartphones, their teachers said.
“How could we teach only those students who had smartphones and neglect the ones who did not? They (students) were missing out, so, with the permission of the district headquarters, we decided to travel to their villages and teach them in open air,” said Nirmal Kumar Singh, the principal of the school.
Singh, and six more teachers of his school, asked students to carry their notebooks, and a rag, and come to a farm field for the first such class here on May 29. Later, two more schools in Hussainabad block pitched in and started sending their teachers to villages for taking classes.
Rameshwar Mehta, the principal of Rajkiya Madhya Vidyalaya Dangwar, one of the schools that run these open air classes in Palamu, said that many students in villages of Hussainabad did not even have access to televisions, and therefore, they could not benefit from tutorials telecasted on DD channels.
“We focus on the students who do not have access to smartphones and TV sets. The location for the classes is decided, and students are asked to come to the location, usually in the morning,” Mehta said. “We take all necessary precautions during the classes. Social distancing is maintained, and students or teachers are not allowed to join if they don’t wear masks,” he added.
As many as 499 children are enrolled in Mehta’s school, but less than 100 of them have smartphones at home, he said. Rajesh Kumar, the principal of Middle School Hussainabad said that many students sell vegetables and samosas to eke out a living here. “There is no harm if our little effort brightens their future,” he said.
Schools across the country have been closed since the imposition of lockdown in the last week of March this year. While children in urban areas found easy access to teachers through online classes, many children living in rural areas of the country were left out due to lack of accessibility to gadgets and the internet, sources said.
This initiative in Jharkhand also ensures that students do not fall prey to Covid-19 virus during the classes, said Nilesh Sharma, district coordinator of Gyan Setu scheme in Palamu. “Teachers, who have volunteered to do this job, have been strictly warned against visiting areas where Covid-19 cases have surfaced,” he said. “They do not go to villages where migrant labourers have returned recently, and are also not sent for any duty at the quarantine centres,” he added.
The Government here had launched the Digi Sath initiative, which used WhatsApp as a platform for imparting lessons to students online. The initiative, however, could not help the students who did not have access to smartphones and the internet, teachers said.
