India: Teachers carry textbooks, stationery to students stuck in tribal hamlets

Agali - They carried books and stationery on their heads and shoulders, walking for about 10 km after a 25-km jeep ride from Agali to Anavai.

By Web Report

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Published: Fri 11 Jun 2021, 12:44 PM

The Covid-19 crisis has seen hundreds of thousands school students staying at home and continuing their education through the online mode. But there are many students living in remote parts of India, where accessing data from teachers in cities even with smart phones is difficult because of power failures and lack of telecom infrastructure.

Realising the challenges that confront such students, teachers of the Government Higher Second School at Agali in Palakkad district in Kerala embarked on a challenging mission: visit the students living in remote jungles and hand them textbooks and other required academic material.


Joseph Antony, a student police cadet community officer at Agali led the teachers through hilly areas, jungles, crossing furious rivers and trekking through leech-infected forests to reach to students in the remote areas of Attapaddy. They carried books and stationery on their heads and shoulders, walking for about 10 km after a 25-km jeep ride from Agali to Anavai. T. Satyan, nodal officer of the school’s electoral literacy club, described it as one of the toughest experiences in their lives.

Of course, the students were overjoyed when they saw their teachers trudge into their village in the hilly area. And when they were given sweets that their teachers had brought along, they had no words to thank them.


One of the teachers told a newspaper that life is tough in the hamlets. The teachers stayed there for four days to understand life in the jungles. Most of the students depend on solar power for online studies, but during the monsoons, it cannot be accessed.

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Photo: Alamy.ae
Photo: Alamy.ae

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