For most of the last year, a middle-aged man with a blackboard on his motorcycle was seen circling the remote tribal villages of Singrauli after schools were ordered to close during the Covid-19 pandemic. For Sharad Pandey, a science teacher at a government secondary school in Shahpur in Vaidhan tehsil, providing classroom experience to his underprivileged students was paramount, and he was dedicated to the task of covering 12 to 15 remote settlements.
“No amount of online teaching can replace the power of classroom teacher-student interaction and the learning that takes place in this context. The classroom experience cannot be abandoned,” said Pandey, of distance learning social interaction Not allowed, an important component of education.
Singrauli, India’s energy hub in Madhya Pradesh, is dotted with coal mines and thermal power plants, but its villages still lack even the most basic of infrastructure. Roads, many still unserved, make access to these villages a struggle, while weak mobile connectivity and lack of other essential resources have made education inaccessible to students in the wake of the pandemic.
Pandey’s student Rakesh and two of his friends cycled for their studies outside Banauli, one of several villages that are part of Pandey’s initiative. For these teenagers, Sundays were hardly different from their workdays, as the state government ordered the closure of schools. Back then it had become a routine to reach your study site to get a stable data connection on your smartphone.
Between 10 am and 11 am, these school children will sit on either side of the road leading to Banauli, trying to access their lessons on WhatsApp groups created under DigiLEP, the state government’s ‘digital learning enhancement programme’. In 2020, the Madhya Pradesh Education Department launched DigiLEP under the banner of ‘Hamara Ghar – Our School’ (Our Home, Our School) to promote the idea of achieving education at home.
However, for Rakesh and his friends the side of the road had turned into their school. Still, they managed to be part of 31.8 percent of children from 1,499 villages in Madhya Pradesh who had regular access to smartphones for online classes.
Pandey admitted that it was not easy for school children in rural Madhya Pradesh despite platforms like DigiLEP. Even before this, they were aware of the poor network coverage in these remote areas, and that not everyone would be able to agree on roadside ‘study spots’ with connectivity away from their homes.
“Most of the students opted for pre-recharged cell phones, and some had their own laptops,” he said. “But some had only one phone in the family. There were also students who had no phones at all in their homes. ,
Last year, when teachers ordered students to stay at home and study through their mobile devices, 14-year-old Muskan from Garh village was left confused. “There was no internet coverage at home. We even had to go out for a phone call,” she shared her plight.
Muskan, a scheduled tribe from the Godh community, was one of the thousands who faced such hardships in these tribal villages.
In August 2021, a survey titled ‘Locked Out: Emergency Report on School Education’, conducted by Schoolchildren: Online and Offline Learning, found that even though pandemic-enforced restrictions had pushed for distance learning, it was a major factor in education inequality. It was reversed.
An important finding of this survey, conducted on 1,362 students across 15 states and union territories, was that 49 per cent of the rural population did not have a smartphone. And in households where this was the case, only 15 percent of rural children were able to use it for regular study; The primary reasons for inequality were poor connectivity, lack of funds for internet services, and most households having just one smartphone that belonged to an older member of the household.
Furthermore, the study found that the impact was even more severe among students from marginalized communities – only 4 percent of children from SC and ST communities in rural areas were able to study online regularly.
To correct this imbalance to some extent, Pandey took upon himself the responsibility of teaching marginalized tribal students from the villages of Singrauli. When the online learning model was introduced, “initially, most of the students didn’t know what to do, while the parents thought it was just a holiday”, he explained. He thought these challenges would exacerbate the future problem of high rural illiteracy, which is why he decided to “get out and teach them offline”. With his motorcycle-mounted blackboard mount and Bluetooth speaker, he started mohalla classes. They started with the villages of Garh, Harrai, Gahil Garh, Banauli, Navjeevan Vihar and Telagawa, which were mostly inhabited by the Godh and Bhil Scheduled Tribe communities.
“It was very difficult to reach the children. Social distancing was mandatory, so I had to opt for open areas with limited number of students,” the Good Samaritan recalled the challenges.
Pandey said that at first he provided notebooks, stationery, masks and sanitizers to these students at his own expense and later the people of the village helped.
His mohalla classes, or community classes, would begin every day at 9 a.m., with 25 students in each class. Science remained his primary subject, but Pandey also taught English. These students were informed about their upcoming classes on WhatsApp and through phone calls in case of lack of internet. In all, around 120 students were part of Pandey’s mohalla classes, of whom 65 percent were girls in classes 6 to 8.
In addition, Pandey’s offline classes were of remarkable help for girls in these villages, who had been engaged in gender-specific chores at home since the schools were ordered to close. “When a teacher comes, the parents are forced to send the girls to the class,” he explained.
For example, a girl from a Dalit community belonging to the Saket community dropped out after class VIII because her parents did not allow her to continue her studies. But after regular interactions with his parents during mohalla classes, Pandey “convinced them to read it” whenever he came to teach. “She became a regular student, her name back in the school register,” he said proudly.
Pandey is happy to know that his efforts have paid off. All the students of his mohalla classes had passed their assessment.
(The writer is a Bhopal-based freelance journalist and member of 101Reporters, a pan-India network of grassroots journalists.)
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