Dantewada's Education City is kindling dreams for kids affected by Naxalism

In the last few years, rebels blew up 86 schools and ashrams in the area. The violence left nearly 22,000 children out of school

The thought of the long school break ahead does not bring cheer to 11-year-old Sunil Mandavi, a student at Education City in Chhattisgarh’s restive Dantewada district. He, along with his two younger brothers and two sisters, will remain in hostel during the vacation.

The children do not have a home to go back to. Their parents were killed during the Naxal conflict that the region has come to be identified by. About three years ago, heavily armed left-wing extremists raided the children’s village, Mangnaar, about 100 km from the district headquarters of Dantewada. They dragged Sunil’s father, Sudram, and mother, Sukdi, out of the house, “charged” them with working as police informers and pumped bullets into their bodies.

Sunil’s youngest sister, Jayanti, was three-and-a-half years old when the incident took place. The rebels had earlier killed their uncle and his family, leaving the children with no relative to turn to.

The children now live at Aastha Vidya Mandir, a residential school set up on gurukul lines in Dantewada Education City for children from the state’s Naxal-infested pockets. The school’s staff are their family now — their “parents”. Some of the teachers will stay back to spend the vacation with Sunil and other orphaned children in school.

“Sunil is not the only one who lost his family,” says Santosh Pradhan, principal of Aastha Vidya Mandir. “There are 19 other orphans in the school who have no relatives left alive because of the violence.” As many as 175 children have lost a parent.

One-third of the 1,000 students at the school are those who have been affected by Naxalism in one way or the other. Of these, 216 were displaced from their villages following threats by insurgents.

An aerial view of Education City. Photo: R Krishna Das

Aastha, as the school is popularly referred to, is one of the 18 institutions in Education City — an ambitious project that has been ranked by global audit major, KPMG, as being among the 100 best innovative infrastructures in the world. The idea for the project was born at a time when extremism was at its peak in the area and when the now disbanded Salwa Judum — a vigilante group of armed civilians — intensified its war against Naxalites.

Ordinary folks bore the brunt of the violence. Thousands of people were displaced from their villages. Many took shelter in government-run camps. As the administration scrambled to manage the situation, it was faced with another mammoth challenge — providing education to Naxalism-hit children in a pocket that now had among the country’s lowest literacy rates.

The BPO training centre in Dantewada. Photo: R Krishna Das

“I believe education is a potent way to end the scourge of left-wing extremism in the region,” says Om Prakash Choudhary, a 2005-batch Indian Administrative Service officer and architect of Education City. He took on the challenge soon after taking over as Dantewada District Collector in March 2011.

Dantewada has witnessed the killing of 332 security personnel, 285 civilians and 150 extremists in the last few years. The topography of the area makes it fertile ground for Naxals to survive in and thrive. The district is located vulnerably, at the junction of the forests of Andhra Pradesh, Odisha and Maharashtra. As much as 67 per cent of this land is forest area (not including revenue forest, where felling of trees is allowed).

To prevent security personnel from taking shelter in built structures during patrols, rebels blew up 86 schools and ashrams in the area. The violence left nearly 22,000 children out of school, plunging literacy rates down to 42 per cent (2011 census). “The district administration realised the need to enrol these out-of-school children,” says Choudhary who is now posted as Collector, Raipur.

The only way to make this possible was by providing fully residential educational campuses.

Students inside a classroom. Photo: R Krishna Das

The administration got down to work. It convinced the ministry of human resources development to sanction a 500-head residential campus built with portable cabins (prefabricated bamboo structures). The National Bamboo Mission provided technical and financial assistance. Porta-cabins made sense as the safety of permanent structures was difficult to ensure given the constant threat of extremist action. Besides, the administration wanted the project to take shape as quickly as possible.

To begin with, an assessment of panchayats where schools were closed due to conflict or were destroyed by extremists was done with the help of locals who visited the haats (weekly markets). The assessment, based on hearsay as well as earlier population surveys, was used to estimate the number of children who were out of school or were deprived of education in inaccessible parts of the district.

The classrooms use technology for imparting lessons. Photo: R Krishna Das

Educated but unemployed boys and girls, called BRG (Block Resource Group) volunteers or anudeshaks, were employed to survey the out-of-school children and enrol them at a particular porta-cabin, which served as a school. Incentives were provided to these volunteers. The experiment paid off: the number of school dropouts fell from 50 per cent in 2011 to 13 per cent in 2013.

“Choo Lo Aasmaan (aim for the sky)” was another milestone project that brought boys and girls of Classes XI and XII from across the district to receive special coaching for entrance exams to medical and engineering colleges. A coaching institute from Kota in Rajasthan, the Mecca of coaching, was roped in for this.

“The coaching equipped us to appear for competitive exams. It was a turning point in our lives,” says Santosh Kumar Sori, a second-year student of Jagdalpur medical college in Chhattisgarh. Baman Singh Mandavi, another student from a remote tribal area, now studies engineering at the National Institute of Information Technology (NIIT), Agartala.

The district administration also tried to make education attractive so that people living in remote areas would send their child to school. Activities such as “Children Talent Festival” and summer camps provided children with a platform to express their latent talents.

In a backward district like Dantewada, where the responsibility of providing education rests primarily — if not wholly — on the government, it was necessary to establish and create sufficient infrastructure to implement these initiatives.

There was also a need to shield the children from a strife-torn environment where violence had become a part of their lives. With these goals in mind, the district administration embarked upon setting up a full-fledged educational hub.

The dream was realised through the convergence of various schemes and departments. The National Mineral Development Corporation, the country’s largest iron ore exporter and producer, for instance, gave a major chunk of its corporate social responsibility fund to the project.

Today, Education City stands on roughly 170 acres of land and offers residential and classroom educational facilities. While Aastha offers classes up to Class X, the sprawling complex also has a girls’ higher secondary school. The premises are free from the shadow of the gun. No armed security personnel are in sight. Considerable care is taken to ensure that nothing gives the children the impression that things aren’t “normal”.

The City has 18 institutions with a total capacity for 5,500 students. There is a CBSE-affiliated English-medium model school, an ashram run by the tribal department, a 500-head residential school for boys and girls, a girls’ hostel, a girls’ school (Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalaya), the Choo Lo Aasmaan project, the Aastha gurukul, an industrial training institute, a polytechnic, a 1,000-seater state-of-the-art auditorium, as well as indoor and outdoor sports stadiums.

The roads are lit by solar street lights, and the city has an integrated drinking water system and drainage plan.

As for coaching, professionals from national institutes are hired after tenders are floated; the schools mostly have government teachers. “The teachers are very sharp and alert to issues even at the micro level,” says Pradhan, explaining how the psychological needs of the students are also attended to.

For example, when Sunil was asked about his life’s ambition, he said he wanted to join the security forces. “The teachers were attentive and conducted psychological tests to understand whether his goal was aimed at taking revenge as he was witness to his parents’ killing,” says a member of the school staff. The final report underlined that the student was in a positive state of mind.

Situated on National Highway 16, Education City has, in a sense, become a gateway to the district. Not only has it created a positive atmosphere of education in the district, it has also encouraged the children here to take pride in their association with it. “The city takes care of a student right from under-kindergarten (UKG) level. The aim is to ensure that he or she walks out with a job in hand,” says Madhu Rao, a member of the staff.

Last month, a Business Process Outsourcing unit, or BPO, opened in Education City. This is the first BPO in the Naxal-hit Bastar region where Dantewada district is located. “The centre will be a game-changer in the history of Bastar. It will generate jobs for 1,000 people,” says M Shreenath, the BPO in-charge and District Information Officer.

Managed by Hyderabad-based Sixth Generation Technologies, a web-developer, e-commerce and SEO service provider, the centre will provide services to Airtel, NIT Infotech and banks such as ICICI, HDFC, Induslnd Bank and Bank of America.

Shreenath says the BPO has a low investment cost given the location, which is a big advantage. The centre, set up within a record three months, started operations after providing technical and soft-skills training to over 450 youths — almost half of them women.

The employees will earn Rs 8,000 to Rs 14,000 a month, will have access to affordable accommodation and will get concessional fares if they travel from remote areas. The incentives are being offered and routed through the District Project Livelihood College Society, Dantewada. To attract applications, eligibility has been capped at Class X or XII certificates (depending on the job) and applicants are not required to sign bonds.

“It is surprising that youths from the interior areas of the region who speak Godi-Halbi (dialects of Bastar) and who could not speak Hindi fluently are communicating in flawless English,” says Shreenath. The centre, he says, is flooded with applications from aspirants.

The transformation in the terror zone is evident. When Manish Mandavi, a young man from the badly hit Somali village of Dantewada, was leaving home to join the BPO, the entire village came to see him off — cocking a snook at the Naxal policy that prevents youths from taking up jobs or joining mainstream society. Light at the end of a dark red tunnel.