Barefoot teachers usher in change
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There is a letter received from France that Nirmala Purandare is very proud of. And why not, since it proves that an initiative taken in the right direction will always pay rich dividends.
In this case, it was the deputing of a group of women teachers to France where, in spite of being totally ignorant of the language, they were able to teach in a French school, bringing its students closer to an understanding of Indian culture.
This association of Purandare with building academic bridges goes back a long way. Pune-based Nirmala Purandare began working with students in the early-’70s, when she was asked to take care of rural students who came to the city for higher education. But she was bothered by one question. “I felt that those who made it so far constituted a very small percentage. Why did the rest of the rural children give up their education mid-way or never go to school at all? My attempts to seek an answer to this query led me to this process of taking education to the doorsteps of rural children,” says Purandare, who was recently honoured with the Baya Karve Award instituted by the Maharshi Karve Stree Shikshan Sanstha.
The objective was simple: to get semi-educated village women to sign up for a six months’ teacher training programme that would enable them to start balwadis (nurseries) in their villages. “So far, we have trained more than 10,000 women who had dropped out of school in the sixth grade. They had never made any use of their elementary education and had confined themselves to living a conventional life of looking after the family and fighting the many odds in most of our villages. "These women are now not the same. With new-found confidence, they have gone from home to home, urging parents to send their children between the ages of three and six to attend balwadi classes so as to learn the basics of language and arithmetic, as also hygiene. These teachers are now preparing a whole new generation of students who are quite enthused about completing their basic education,” says Purandare. The VRDC works in eight districts of Maharashtra. Around 45 trained teachers conduct training programmes in the talukas, making it convenient for rural women to attend classes and also fulfill their domestic responsibilities. “What we drill into their minds is the concept of strengthening the foundation for a child’s future interest in education. The reason why the dropout rate in rural schools is very high is that there are no facilities for pre-primary education. The child enters primary school totally unprepared and either rebels against the system or loses interest altogether,” Purandare explains. Proof that the organisation is moving in the right direction is the increasing number of rural women queueing up for its training programmes. Between April 2005 and March 2006, 32 programmes were conducted in Sangamner, Parandwadi, Jejuri, Shrirampur, Sinnar and Udgir, training a total number of 600 candidates. Role models An important fallout of the training programmes is that balwadi teachers begin to function as multipurpose workers. Purandare explains: “They inculcate the values of education, family planning, nutrition, healthcare and hygiene and take on the role of effective communicators for the village in dealing with local governing bodies. Moreover, their new status in the village prompts other women to change their perspective on education. We have had cases where illiterate women are now adamant about sending their children to balwadis or Zilla Parishad schools because they see the teacher as a role model.” Narrating her experience of working for the cause, Sushma Deshpande, a teacher, has this to say: “Coming as I do from a rural background, I understand that education cannot be looked upon as a factor in isolation. The primary need for any villager is to survive and education is but a luxury. Therefore, our attempt is to integrate the two in such a way that they begin to see how education can actually better their lives in the long run. It’s a difficult task but not impossible.” Things are not as easy as they sound for Purandare and her team of committed social workers. “Many of our trained teachers have opted to take up jobs in government schools instead of starting balwadis. This is something that we cannot prevent. But our satisfaction lies in the fact that we have come a long way from 1979 when we experimented with a batch of 30 women in Shirur taluka,” says Purandare. Gradually moving into the area of women’s empowerment, VRDC is busy devising schemes to enable women to make the best use of local resources to generate income. At a village near Somtane Phata, on the Pune-Mumbai highway, women have come forward to learn rickshaw driving. “We will help them learn driving, acquire licences and also obtain loans. The only problem is that the project is not gaining enough momentum because women feel insecure about driving rickshaws. Therefore, we have also started training them in other vocations such as tailoring and candle-making,” says Purandare. In a country with 20 crore illiterate people, 70% of whom are women, activists like Purandare are striving hard to change the statistics. |
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