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INDIA BEATS
Platform for progress
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If children can’t come to school, then the school has to go to them. Thus was born Ruchika’s “platform schools". HARIHARAN BALAKRISHNAN
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Photo: Hariharan Balakrishnan
Making education accessible: Inderjit Khurana.
A young housewife, new to Bhubaneswar, started a pre-school in her house with two students: her sister’s daughter and the gardener’s daughter. Soon, she put up a small board, “Ruchika” on the gate. This attracted curious neigh
bours who got used to seeing a couple of children laughing and playing with a lady in the “posh” Forest Park house. The number of tiny tots soon grew to 11 and then 20.
Soon after, she started a school in a rented building. Ruchika was a school with a difference. Teachers took the students out to post-offices and railway stations, banks and bridges to give them a “feel” of what they learn in books, and “see” how things work. Every day, the lady saw a number of children from nearby slums peeping in at the gate. “But I didn’t have the freedom to open my own gates to those poor semi-clad children. We have stratified our society that way. That really hurt,” she now says.
Whenever she went to the railway station, she saw children with bright faces wiping compartment floors and begging from passengers. Inderjit Khurana’s husband was an engineer in the Army, and the Khuranas had moved to Bhubaneswar in 1970s. When asked what brought them to Bhubaneswar, Inderjit smiles, “Destiny”.
Idea that worked
Inderjit often thought of the children outside her gate and those bright faces covered with grime. She hit upon the unique idea of “Platform schools”. If a child cannot come to the school, the school should go to the child! She asked teachers in Ruchika if they would volunteer to teach the “platform children” early in the morning before they started their regular work. Only one, R.P. Dwivedi, the physical training instructor, agreed “provided you don’t sack me if I say ‘no’ after one month”. Ruchika’s Platform School was born, with one frail lady and a physical training instructor marking the boundaries of the “school” with chalk in one corner of the Bhubaneswar railway platform. The duo went with toys, paper, crayons, soap and towels. Platform children flocked in and “it was a joy to see them bathing and laughing. They drew, talked and asked very intelligent questions”, recalls Inderjit 27 years later.
A grant from Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay Trust pushed the idea forward. Today, Ruchika runs 12 platform schools, six nurseries, 75 slum schools, 20 nursery schools, preventive HIV and AIDS projects, two “schools on wheels”, vocational training and clean water-sanitation projects in the slums. Healthcare and an ambulance service are also part of the team. Besides providing basic education, Ruchika believes in building up children’s self-esteem and opening the door to a life free from poverty, child labour and violence. The vehicle for this laudable work is the Ruchika Social Service Organisation. I went to RSSO to get a feel of what is happening.
A resource person was sharing ideas and experiences in the field with a batch of 20-odd field workers. Dwivedi, Project Officer of RSSO, said they have field workers in strategic locations like railway stations, bus stands and hospitals. “Each porter in the railway station has details about Ruchika. All the auto-rickshaw drivers too know they can approach us for help if they see someone in distress. Pamphlets with details of our work, address and telephone numbers are given regularly at these places.”
The two-storied RSSO building houses around 20 boys and a “shifting number of girls” who live, learn and eat there. Says Inderjit, “When we say ‘girls’, it includes women of all ages. The latest inmate is a mother of four. She is from a middle-class family and wanted to get away from her husband, youngest son and three teenage daughters who were only making ‘demands’ on her. We also have girls abandoned by parents, and children of sex workers. We find placements for them after they learn useful skills. The number keeps changing, since most girls don’t stay long for completing their studies. They move on, once they get a placement or are claimed by their parents. But the boys stay till they finish school. Each has his own bicycle. Soon, we are shifting this office (in the ground floor) to another house down the street. Once that is done, this entire building will be for these children.”
The boys had come back from school by then. Most were playing kabaddi in the foreyard. Others were cheering from the sidelines, maybe waiting their turn. Once back in the building, I went to the boys’ rooms. Some were watching TV; others had books for company. Suman is in Class XII and scored 78 per cent in his last exam. He wants to be an engineer. At the age of six, he ran away from his village home and was found on the platform. Siddharth scored 75 per cent in Class X, and aims at a career in computers. The girls were busy with indoor games, knitting and stitching.
Recognition
Earlier this year, Inderjit was one of three people nominated by 5.2 million children around the world for the World’s Children’s Prize for the Rights of the Child. In the finals, she got one of the two Honorary Awards. In April, she went to Stockholm with two slum children and R.P. Dwivedi to receive the award from Queen Sylvia of Sweden. “It was a wonderful experience and quite moving to be recognised by the children of the world themselves”, smiles the lady who used to “stand on my toes and wave a newspaper to catch the attention of the government doctor to treat my platform child”. That was 25 years ago.
India Beats features stories of the unusual, the exotic and the extraordinary.
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