Dropouts find their way back to school

Shimla, September 09 Kamlesh is 16 and has never been to a school. She comes from a remote village in Sirmour district and has been working as a domestic help. Till recently she feared the very concept of going to school. But this was before she went to a village summer camp- a unique brain child of Pratham, an NGO working in the field of elementary education. As the month long summer school concluded, it changed her perception. “Abhi bhi der nahin hui ,” ( Its not too late yet) she says. Kamlesh is just one of the success stories from several such summer camps that were organised in remote villages of the state by Pratham under its “Read India” campaign. As several of these month-long camps concluded, the results were encouraging. “The number of children in the state, who can read, has increased now,” says Vivek Sharma, head of the North India initiatives of Pratham.

The Indian Express visited some of these summer camps in villages of Sirmour. Enthusiasm among the children at Jogiban village near Nahan could be seen as despite heavy rains, they made their way to attend the “special tuition”, as many called it. Books and blackboards made way for colourful learning kits, games, rhymes and play-grounds. This pedagogic approach helped to attract and retain students like Kamlesh. “On the first day I saw the kids playing interesting games and the teacher didi explained to me that the kids are learning to read. This made me join the classes,” she says.

“The children are engrossed in special games that help them identify numbers, alphabets and words as well as the story-telling and paragraph reading sessions,” said Nisha, a shiksha sarthi at one such camp in Bankala.

The comparison of pre and post summer camp results of 1.6 lakh students in 8,874 villages, show an improvement of 15 per cent in overall reading capability of children. Learning capability in terms of numbers and letters has seen an improvement of 13 per cent.

In Bakhras block of Sirmour where number of school dropouts is the highest, 65 kids attended these camps and found a reason to go back to school. Devinder Sharma, coordinator of the summer camps in Bakhras, says, “I personally talked to 20 of such dropouts and their families. They wanted the shiksha saarthis to continue to teach them.”