Gadchiroli kids get home delivery of books through teachers

NAGPUR: The words ‘armed’ and ‘revolution’ can conjure up extreme images, especially when it’s mentioned in context of Naxal-infested Gadchiroli district. But in the district’s remotest Bhamragarh taluka, zilla parishad schoolteachers have started an education revolution by arming themselves with textbooks.
Since July, these teachers have fanned out to over 70 villages located in tough terrain, and distributed free textbooks to their students.This enabled them to push forward their ‘home study’ initiative, which is basically an alternative to the urban ‘online classes’.
Ashwini Sonawane, block education officer of Bhamragarh said, “Online education was never an option here. Tribal children don’t have access to smartphones or computers at home.” Also donating smartphones to some too would have failed to achieve the desired results. “There are many villages where network coverage is either extremely poor, or it’s non-existent,” said Sonawane.
Hence Sonawane’s team of dozens of teachers took it upon themselves to start home visits and conduct group studies. So teachers visit every village once or twice a week and take regular classes. Homework is given and evaluated during teacher’s next visit.
But with children moving on to next academic class, access to textbooks was important. Sonawane said, “They would collect it from school, had it been a normal year. But with that option ruled out, teachers piled books on their two-wheelers and rode out to every single student.”
Considering that there are over 2,000 students in the taluka, spread over 70 villages, it was no mean task. A few of these villages can be accessed only by foot, which means the teacher hauls the entire set of books, after parking the bike at the nearest motorable road. Wading through shallow puddles, hiking steep dirt tracks, these teachers made sure that every ZP school student received their free textbooks allotted by the state government.
Sonawane said, “As I have always said, the process of education cannot stop in this area. If there is too long a gap, then these kids will drop out of formal education system and it will be impossible to bring them back later. Even though our village visit and home study pattern is offline, at least the student remains connected to the education grid.”