People's Democracy

Great Expectations & Hard Times Of Tribal Students

R Arun Kumar

�My name is Vanthala Nageswara Rao and I am studying in 9^th class. My village�s name is Kotha Borampeta, in Koyyur mandal. I am the only one who has come this far to study. My village does not have a school, bus service or electricity�no�we do not have a telephone at all in our village, we don�t even have drinking water facility in our village.� These are the words of a 14-year old tribal boy, spoken with determination in his eyes. He dreams to become an engineer. Can his dreams be realised? It is not because he is poor in his studies but it is the poor condition of his school and his abject poverty that makes us sceptical.

38 percent of tribal children in our country are out of school. It is an accepted fact that the rate of literacy among the most backward sections in our society is the least and this has to be addressed with topmost priority. The government instead of taking concrete steps like the introduction of the right to education bill has done precious little in this regard. In the draft bills, it tries to shift the onus on the parents by blaming them for not sending their children to schools. That this argument is completely false can be once again established by quoting many anecdotes like that of Nageswara Rao. A girl student with whom we had interacted had recalled how her friend got drowned in a streamlet when they were trying to cross it to attend the school in the neighbouring village. Many students work even as daily labourers to earn money to meet their educational expenses. In a recent tour of an SFI delegation to the tribal agency areas in Visakhapatnam district of Andhra Pradesh, startling facts that question the government�s commitment of educating the tribal students have come to the fore.

Visakhapatnam district in Andhra Pradesh is one of the fastest growing cities today. It is the only district in the state that has a majority of its area - 52.9 per cent - in the scheduled area. The tribal areas in this district are rich in natural resources and attract one and all. They lure the big capitalists because of their rich reserves of bauxite, precious gemstones and the like, while the middle-classes get attracted to its scenic beauty. In a way this area should have been more �developed� because of its closeness or interaction with the �civilised society� but this has not happened. The data of the government itself accepts this fact. There are nearly 500 habitations in the district without schools and nearly all of them are in the tribal areas.

We visited eight mandals and 26 educational institutions of various types in the Visakha agency to study the problems of the tribal students. Many of the educational institutions and hostels of the tribals are bereft of even basic amenities and function with severe infrastructural and academic constraints.

Not a single educational institute in the agency that we visited has full strength teaching faculty. Almost all the institutes have vacant teaching posts. In some of the institutions teachers are appointed on contract basis, but even then, important subjects like mathematics, English and sciences do not have teachers and this is one of the important reasons for the low pass percentage in the area. The Paderu Government College, located at a stones throw away from the Integrated Tribal Development Authority office is a glaring example of this fact. This college has nearly 5000 students with only 23 lecturers. Of them, only ten are permanent appointees. In this college, there are only five computers in working condition for the computer science students. Therefore practical classes are not held for the past many months. The authorities have collected Rs 50 from each student to ensure pass marks in the practical examinations.

Drinking water and water for bathing purposes is another important problem in all the institutions that we visited. Most of the girls� hostels do not have bathrooms and even in the few ones that have, they are virtually useless. In the Degree College Women�s Hostel (Student Managed), Paderu, which has strength of 700 students, there are only five usable bathrooms out of the thirty that exist. In Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalayam, Hukumpeta there are four toilets and bathrooms and none can be used. As there is no drain, the water used for washing clothes and other purposes stagnates in a pool and becomes a good breeding ground for mosquitoes. The bathrooms do not have proper doors and also bulbs. The septic tank is full and is waiting to be cleaned for the past 3-4 months. This is forcing the girls to go to the nearby water sources for attending to their daily needs and bathing. This water is polluted and unhygienic and has caused many skin diseases among the students. There were incidents of death of students due to drowning in these water bodies during the rainy season when they are in full spate. Another important problem is that girls have to walk through the streets of the village to these water bodies in odd hours facing sexual harassment.

The food that is served to the students in all the hostels is unhygienic and insufficient. The menu that the government had declared boisterously is not implemented in any of the hostels. The government had in fact cut the ration of rice served to each student from 550 gm to 500 gm and this is leaving many students go half-hungry. Thus almost all the students are anaemic and suffer from malnutrition.

Related to this are their health problems. Most of the hostels do not have a resident Auxiliary Nurse-cum-Mid-wife in their premises which is mandatory. This problem is acute in the college student girls' hostel where the need for them is more. The government has said that a qualified MBBS doctor would visit all the hostels every month and this has not happened in any hostel.

Budida Malam Naidu studying in sixth class is the eldest in their family who is the first to attend a school. He goes to Boiteli Ashram Upper Primary School in G Madugula mandalam. He had an infection in left ear that discharged pus regularly and blood occasionally, which was shown to a RMP doctor. His school that was supposed to have a medical check-up every month did not have it for the past many months and so this boy did not get an opportunity to show it to a qualified doctor. Now he has partial deafness in that ear.

The situation is so pathetic that even in the district headquarter, a girl student residing in the post-matric hostel, Killa Bhagawathi had succumbed to diarrhoea because of the absence of proper and timely medical help. The mandatory sick room in the hostels is non-existent in most of the hostels and wherever they exist they are in a bad shape. We have seen a sick room with cow dung in it while sick students of the same hostel were recouping in the dormitories.

Accommodation is another big problem for the students. No hostel or ashram school has the sufficient infrastructure to accommodate all the students residing in them.

In a campus of the AP Tribal Welfare Residential Educational Society Institute, Araku Valley where the school and junior college are run together, there are nearly 1050 students in the entire campus-661 school students and the rest are college students. In the college, only three regular posts exist and all the rest are filled on contract basis or as guest lecturers. The rooms are cramped and there are no sufficient infrastructure facilities available in the campus. Some of the cots that are provided are in such a dilapidated condition that students have put some logs as support to ensure that they do not break from the middle. The students are not provided blankets and to protect themselves from the biting cold of the region, they stitched jute bags into blankets. Water is a big problem as only one bore well is available.

The condition is the same in most of the hostels/ashram schools. Many of the rooms neither have doors nor windows. Many students sleep in the classrooms and even in staff rooms. In the KGBV, Hukumpeta, three girls sleep on the principal�s table and three underneath it during nights. And this is regarded as the showpiece education institute started in educationally backward areas to reduce dropouts.

Most of the hostels/schools have broken and leaking roofs. We had visited these institutes during intermittent rains before monsoon, but during monsoons and incessant rains, it is virtually impossible to stay in them. Glaring examples are the Boiteli Ashram Upper Primary School and the Residential ITI in Araku.

The girls in the KGBV were given three pairs of uniform three years back and are asked to wear them without fail even today! The boys go bald or cut each other�s hair because they do not have money to go to a barber. Sexual assaults that resulted in pregnancies, reports of AIDS, drunken teachers, fatalities due to lack of timely and proper health care and many such heart-wrenching tales were told to us that cannot be written due to space constraints.

The reasons for this horrible state of affairs are the decreasing government funds and apathy of the concerned officials. The status of governmental allocations can be easily understood from the following tables:

Table 1 Grants �in-aid released under the scheme of boys/girls hostel (in lakhs)

Table 2 Grants �in-aid released under the scheme of ashram schools in TSP areas (in lakhs)

Even the allocations for STs under Post Matriculation Scholarship, Book Bank and Upgradation of merit were reduced to Rs 163.19 crores from Rs 189.78 crores in 2006-07.

The government instead of fulfilling its responsibilities is threatening the teachers and students with disciplinary action if they fail to show good 'results' in the examinations. Unless the government immediately acts to improve the facilities in these institutes and improves the quality of education, we cannot expect an improvement in the condition of the tribal students.

Real development is possible not through throwing open the rich bauxite resources of the agency to the predatory interests of the corporations but in ensuring education, health and other minimum facilities to the tribals. This can be done only when there is a political will. We cannot expect this from the government that is putting the nation�s interests at stake for catering to the interests of the US corporations and Mr Bush. Shravan Kumar, a primary school student in Paderu had shown us a story that he had written. It is about a duck, cat and pig that refuse to help the hen that is hard working but wants to grab the produce. The story concludes with the hen asserting: �I have planted the seed, harvested it, ground it into flour and baked it into bread, so only I shall have the bread�. The moral: �assert and fight for our rights� and force the government to deliver in our interests.