Lokshikshan Pratishthan is translating State Board textbooks from Marathi to Lokshikshan to ensure children from denotified and nomadic tribes can access primary education and lift themselves out of intergenerational cycles of social and economic ostracization
Rucha Satoor, 31st August, 2023
Imagine, you are a 7 year old in a school classroom. While you turn up for school, you’re simply not able to understand a single word of what is being spoken around you. You fight an everyday battle with the language in your textbooks, on your black boards, in your friends’ conversations, on the classroom charts, and in your notebooks.
To add to it, the language being spoken in your school is also not the language that anyone around you, at home or in your neighborhood speaks. This is an average day in the life of a school-going child who belongs to the Pardhi community in Maharashtra.
“Take for example the sentence, ‘tujha naav kaay aahe’ (What is your name) in Marathi. Tujha (your), naav (name), kaay (what) and aahe (is), none of these words belong to Waghri, the language spoken and understood by most nomadic and denotified tribes in Maharashtra,” says Pramod Kale, the founder of Lok Shikshan Pratishthan, an organization working on making education material and pedagogy accessible to children from the Pardhi community in Shrigonda Taluka of Ahmednagar District in Maharashtra.
“Tharu naam shu chha – is their language. For a child going to school from this community, Marathi is as alien as Japanese is. It is no doubt then, that most children from this community lose the drive for education, drop out of school, marry at the age of fourteen or fifteen and are already parents to infants when they turn seventeen.”
“The Pardhis claim their roots to the hinterlands of the central Indian jungles that date back hundreds of years. They were once considered the children of the forests, but their identity took a beating when they, along with around 150 other tribes, were branded as a ‘criminal tribe’ by the British colonial government in 1871 for rebelling against the regime. For eighty years thereafter, they were booked under the Criminal Tribes Act and were segregated and forced to live in camps outside the village limits, facing extreme poverty, displacement and discrimination,” writes award-winning photographer Sudharak Olwe in The Wire, who has traveled with the Pardhis all over Maharashtra.
The Act was repealed in 31st of August 1952, celebrated widely as ‘Vimukta Din’, the economic and social ostracization of the community still remains stark.
“Pardhi families often make up the working classes who live on the streets of Pune, Mumbai and Hyderabad selling balloons, toys and trinkets. Owing to severe marginalisation for their caste background, they have to often resort to begging. Being a community which is forced to live four to five kilometres outside a village boundary with the tag of ‘criminals’, their children rarely socialise with anyone outside their own families and are often bullied and targeted in school,” shares Pramod.
As a first generation graduate member of the Pardhi community himself, Pramod was aware that his community was also plagued with superstitious beliefs, domestic violence and notions of untouchability within the community. Pramod, who holds a B.Sc. in Physics from Fergusson College is a former recipient of the ActionAid Fellowship, Samvaad Fellowship and Samata Fellowship in which he has worked on addressing Dalit Atrocities and the cultural documentation of the Pardhis.
While his work earlier worked on direct confrontation with caste-based violence, he soon came to a crystal clear realisation. “While there is only so much one can do to change the structure, we wanted to work on preventing violence and widespread superstitions by empowering the community from within.”
In 2019, Pramod along with other members of the organisation, started on three fronts – addressing superstition within the community, education for children and creating opportunities for livelihood. In 2022, Lok Shikshan Pratishthan took on the challenging task of creating a curriculum which would help children access primary education by translating the Marathi State Board curriculum in the Waghri language.
“We have translated all the syllabus using the ‘Simultaneous Learning Method’ where each page of our textbook is presented in both Waghri and Marathi. By bridging this gap in language, we teach children to learn concepts in both languages together.”
By seeking technical support from Vardhishnu Sanstha (Jalgaon) and Econet (Pune), the group of workers from Lok Shikshan Pratishthan set up five Community Learning Centres under the Hamari Shala (our school) programme in their taluka. But the Pardhi community is traditionally a migrant community, forced to move around continuously for earning their livelihood.
“We started off by convincing parents to settle in one place for their child’s education. We had to counsel parents about why their child’s education was of paramount importance to get them out of generational cycles of migration. For creating livelihoods in their villages, we have created fifteen Self-Help Groups. We are working on creating four key skills for education amongst the children – Reading, Writing, Listening and Comprehension.”
Along with translating the syllabus, the organisation has also worked on creating stimulating cognitive materials like the cards in the pictures above. By making permutations and combinations of various letters to make small words, children enjoy the process of playing around while building their Marathi and Waghri vocabulary.
Today, Lok Shikshan Pratishthan works with 138 children, 50 of whom are girls. They are also knowledge and implementation partners of the Maharashtra Technical Board of Education’s Baalbharti. In the future, the organiation also hopes to extend their work in Pune, Beed, Solapur, Osmanabad and other talukas of Ahmednagar district.
From the director to educators who actually go on-ground to mobilise and teach children, most members of the organization are from the community itself. “When parents see that their children are being taught by teachers who speak their language, that inspires a connection and aspiration for education within them,” shares Pramod.
Pramod who started the work in 2019 has been working with great determination even in the face of enormous challenges, financial, social and economic. “Seeing that the challenges faced by my community are more grave and immediate than my personal challenges, I feel propelled to do my best. My wife Jayashree who is also a part of the movement and my two sons Vikrant and Kabir have been solid pillars in this work, even during the hardest of times. However, if we don’t do this work we don’t know who will.”
When he worked on cultural documentation, Pramod wanted to highlight the fact that the mainstream has a lot to learn from Pardhis as well. “There is no concept of wealth accumulation among the community. If one needs hundred rupees for sustenance, one will only earn that much. While we see the children of our community wandering around on the streets for their livelihood and dignity today, we hope to see them in Oxford, Stanford, JNU, TISS, Azim Premji University and all the premier education institutes some day. Education, the only way ahead for us, will empower them to realise their own rights.”
To understand Lok Shikshan Pratishtan’s work in greater detail, one can contact the organisation at lokshikshan2019@gmail.com.