Jyoti

Sharmila Joshi

Editor

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It was noon when the two bulldozers arrived. “Bulldozer, bulldozer…sir…sir…”
the children on the school ground cried out. Hearing their cries, Prakash
Pawar, the principal, and Matin Bhosale, the founder, came running from the
school office.

“Why have you come here?” Pawar asked. “We
want to demolish [the classrooms] for the highway. Please step aside,” said one
of the bulldozer’s drivers. “But no notice was given,” Bhosale protested. “The
order has come from above [the Amravati collector’s office],” the driver said.

The school staff swiftly took out the benches
and green writing boards. They emptied the makeshift library – around 2,000 books in
Marathi on Ambedkar, Phule, Gandhi, world
history and more. All of these were taken
to the nearby school hostel. Soon, the bulldozers struck. One wall crumbled to the ground. 

This continued for two hours on June 6
at the Prashnachinh
Adivasi Ashramshala (Question Mark Adivasi Residential School). The children who stay in the hostel – on summer break since April – watched the
destruction of their classrooms. “So our school won’t start on June 26? Why are
they doing this?” some of them asked.

Yogesh Pawar

Soon, the three thatched classrooms, four concrete classrooms and the
library – where 417 children from the Phanse Pardhi Adivasi community and 30
from the Korku Adivasi community studied in Classes 1 to 10 – were completely
demolished. The Constitutional right to education got buried under the debris
too. 

The school in Amravati district was felled to make way for the Maharashtra
government’s 700-kilometre Samruddhi Mahamarg (‘Prosperity Highway’). The highway will run through 392 villages in
26 talukas.
In Amravati, the highway will cross 46 villages in three talukas.  

“Seven years of our hard work have been wasted,” says 36-year-old Matin.
The school he started for Adivasi children is located in Nandgaon Khandeshwar taluka,
beside a narrow deserted pathway. A letter sent by the Maharashtra State Road
Development Corporation (MSRDC) in June 2018 informs the Amravati district
collectorate that because the school was built on part of a 19.49 hectare
government-owned grazing land on Survey No. 25, “even the question does not
arise of giving compensation.”

The Prosperity Highway will not eat up the two-floor concrete hostel
with 10 rooms, which is home to 60 girls and 49 boys, built on three acres
owned by the Adivasi Phanse Pardhi
Samiti, which runs the school (Matin is the Samiti’s chairman). The hostel and its
two toilet blocks were built with public donations that came in after a support
campaign run by a Marathi newspaper in 2016.

But the government is asking for nearly an acre of these three acres
too. A notice issued by the Amravati district administration on January 11,
2019, says that a 3,800 square metre plot (an acre is around 4,046 square
metres) on Survey No. 37, between the hostel and the now-demolished classrooms,
is also required for the highway. For this, the state has offered Rs. 19.38 lakhs as compensation to the
Samiti.

“This amount is not enough to re-establish the school. Even though the
classrooms, library and kitchen area were on governments land, we must get
compensation as per <a href="https://ruralindiaonline.org/resources/the-right-to-fair-compensation-and-transparency-in-land-acquisition-rehabilitation-and-resettlement-act-2013/">the
law</a>,”
Matin had told me in February 2019. “We haven’t signed the sale deed [with
MSRDC, for the 3800 square metres]. We have registered an objection with the
Amravati collectorate and demanded they first provide alternative land for the
school.” 

Matin
has written several other applications to the Amravati collector and the chief
minister, he has marched with 50-60 kids and school staff to the collector’s
office thrice in 2018, observed a one-day hunger strike in February 2019 –
every time, demanding complete rehabilitation that includes enough land for all
the school structures.

The parents of the kids studying at the Question Mark school were also
worried about the demolition. Around two kilometres from the school, in the
Phanse Pardhi settlement of some 50 huts, Surnita Pawar, 36, sitting outside
her brick house peeling beans, had told me, “My daughter Surnesha completed Class
10 in this school. Now she is doing a correspondence course for Class 11.” Surnita
works as a farm labourer in Mangrul Chawala, a village of 3,763 people adjacent
to her settlement. After the demolition, when I phoned her, she said, “I heard
that the classrooms are destroyed. Surnesh [my son] is in Class 5 there. He was
home for the summer vacation. Where will he go now?”

Her community, the Phanse Pardhis, along with
various other tribes, was branded as ‘criminal’ by the colonial British
government’s Criminal Tribes Act. In 1952, the Indian government repealed
the Act, and the tribes were ‘denotified’. Some of them are now included in the
list of Scheduled Castes, some as Scheduled Tribes, and some are in the Other
Backward Classes category.  (See <a href="https://ruralindiaonline.org/articles/no-crime-unending-punishment">No crime, unending punishment</a>). Around 223,527 Pardhis live in Maharashtra, according to Census 2011, and
within the community, there are various sub-groups, such as Pal Pardhis, Bhil
Pardhis and the Phanse Pardhis.

They continue to face discrimination at various levels. “The villagers
don’t give us work,” Surnita says. “So then our people go to beg to Amravati
city or to Mumbai, Nashik, Pune, Nagpur.”

As did her neighbor, 40-year-old Hindos Pawar. He asked for alms until
a decade ago, then occasionally found work on farms or construction sites.  “I have seen sorrow all my life,” he says. “The
police catch us anytime. It is still happening and it used to happen in my
grandfather’s time too. Nothing has changed. If our children won’t study, they
will also end up like us.” His son Shardesh and daughter Shardesha were in Class
7 and 10 in the Prashnachinh Adivasi Ashramshala when I met the family a few
months ago. 

A 2017 <a href="https://ruralindiaonline.org/resources/socio-economic-status-and-educational-attainment-and-challenges-of-denotified-nomadic-and-semi-nomadic-tribes/">survey</a> by the Council for Social Development, Hyderabad, on
Denotified, Nomadic, and Semi-Nomadic Tribes in 25 districts of Maharashtra,
says in 38 per cent of 199 Pardhi households (the survey covered 1,944
households and 11 communities) children dropped out after primary school due to
discrimination, language barriers, marriage and low awareness about the
importance of education. The survey also says that 2 per cent respondents
reported they are made to sit at the back bench and 4 per cent said the
teachers’ attitude was offensive.

“The zilla
parishad [ZP] school teachers
don’t treat our children well,” Surnita says.  Jibesh Pawar, 14 years old, agrees. “I don’t
want to go back to the ZP school,” he says. Until 2014, Jibesh was studying in
Class 5 at the ZP school in Ajanti village in Ner taluka of Yavatmal district. “The teachers used
to ask me to sit at the back. Other children teased me, calling me Pardhi,
Pardhi… The villagers say we are dirty. Our huts are outside the village. My
mother begs. I also used to go. My father died two years ago.” 

Then Jibesh enrolled in the Prashnachinh Adivasi Ashramshala, around
17 kilometres from his settlement. There is no water and electricity in his
settlement, so he stays at the hostel. “I want to study and join the Army. I
don’t want my mother to beg,” he says. He has just completed Class 9, but his
excitement about reaching the crucial Class 10 has now turned into worry.

Kiran Chavan, 14, was also studying in the ZP school in Jamade village
in Sakri taluka
of Dhule district. His parents cultivate paddy and jowar on two acres of forest
land.  “The villagers are opposed to us
attending the ZP school,” he says. “My friends quit because other children used
to tease them. Our huts are
outside the village. When you enter the village they say, ‘Beware, the thieves
are here’. I don’t why they say this. I am not a thief. The police often come
to our settlement and catch anyone for theft, murder. That’s why I want to be a
policeman. I will not trouble innocents.” 

Knowing
all this too well, Matin Bhosale decided to build a school just for Phanse
Pardhi children. He started in 2012 with 85 children after selling his family’s
six goats and using his savings as a teacher. The school then was a thatched
hut on the three-acre land given by his uncle Shankuli
Bhosale, now 76. Matin says his uncle bought the land for Rs. 200 in 1970 after
saving for years. He used to hunt monitor
lizards, pheasants, rabbits and wild pigs and
sell them in the markets of Amravati city.

Matin’s
wife Seema helps run the school, and their three kids study at the same school
along with children from Phanse Pardhi settlements in Amravati, Beed, Dhule,
Washim and Yavatmal districts. The education offered here is free of all costs
for the kids and their families. Of the school’s eight teachers, four are from
the Phanse Pardhi community.

“The Phanse Pardhis don’t have a permanent home and no [secure] source
of income. They keep travelling. They beg, hunt or do bit of labour if they get
any work,” Matin says. His father used to hunt, his mother would go begging.
“Often, the children beg with their parents at railway stations and bus stops.
They remain deprived of an education and decent jobs. Education and stability
are important for their development. But Pardhi children are still not really accepted
in ZP schools. Where is the right to education for them? And the Maharashtra
government has not provided enough residential schools [for Adivasi children]. How
will they progress then? All these are the Pardhis’ questions – with no answers.
So this is the ‘Prashnachinh [Question Mark] Adivasi Ashramshala.”

Despite the hurdles faced by his family and community, Matin managed
to complete a diploma in Education from the Government Teacher’s College in Amravati
in 2009. For two years he worked as a teacher in the zilla parishad school in Mangrul Chawala, the village outside which
he used to live with his parents and sisters in a hut. He had studied in the
same school, and didn’t drop out, he says, because of a supportive teacher.

In 1991, when Matin was around eight years old, he recalls, “We used
to beg or hunt pheasants and rabbits. Or me and my three elder sisters used to
eat stale food thrown away by the villagers. Once we had eaten [almost] nothing
for 5-6 days. My father couldn’t see us starving. So he plucked 2-3 cobs of jowar
from somebody’s farm. My mother made jowari ambil [curry]
and fed us. Later, the farm owner filed an FIR [first information report at the
police station] against my father saying he stole five quintals of jowar.
His anguished heart made him steal, but there
is a big difference between 2-3 cobs and five quintals.”

His father Shankar Bhosale was jailed in
Amravati for three months. Seeing people there in uniforms, Matin says, his
father realised the power of education and knowledge. “In jail he used
to urge Pardhi inmates to educate their children,” he says, and recalls his father words: ‘If misuse of
knowledge and education can trouble the innocent,
then good use can protect them too’. 

Matin followed his father’s words and became a teacher. And then he
established the school. But seven years later, the school is still struggling
for government recognition and grants, despite numerous letters to the state’s
School Education Department  and Tribal
Development Department. 

In 2015, Matin sent a complaint to the Maharashtra State Commission
for Protection of Child Rights about not being given official recognition and
grants. The Commission reminded the state of its obligation under the Right to Education
Act (RTE, 2009) to ensure that children from disadvantaged groups are not
prevented from completing elementary education. It said the complainant has a right
to run the school and get recognition provided that the school has the
requisite infrastructure and facilities as prescribed by the law.

“It is the government’s responsibility to ensure the primary education
of each and every child, irrespective of caste, class and religion. This is
what the RTE clearly says. If the government had sincerely followed this, this
‘question mark’ would not have arisen. Then when someone establishes such a
school through their own efforts, the government does not even grant it
recognition,” says Bhau Chaskar, an education activist based in Ahmednagar.

“It’s been four years since that order, but neither the tribal
department nor education department have taken any steps,” says Prakash Pawar,
the principal of Question Mark school, who too is from the Phanse Pardhi
community. Through grants, the state government can fund science and computer
labs, library rooms, toilets, drinking water facilities, hostels, teachers’
salaries and more. “All these we manage with public donations,” Pawar adds. 

The donations come in the form of notebooks from a few private schools,
as well as books (for the library), rations and money from individuals and organisations
in the state that help cover expenses, including the salary of the eight
teachers (Rs 3,000 a month) and 15 helpers (Rs. 2,000 a month). 

Despite the challenges, around 50 children have completed Class 10 at
the Question Mark school and are studying further in the towns and cities of
Maharashtra. The school’s girls’ kabaddi team
has won taluka
and state-level competitions in 2017 and 2018.

But now the Prosperity Highway is in the way of their dreams. “I don’t
know how we will start this year’s batch. Maybe we will take classes in the
hostel rooms,” says Pawar.  “We have suffered
‘questions’ of discrimination, rejection, a lack of basic facilities. When we
found ‘education’ as an answer, you [the Maharashtra government] have placed
this new ‘question’ of displacement before us. Why?” Matin asks, angrily. “I
will take all the children to Azad Maidan [in south Mumbai] for a hunger
strike. We will not move till we get a written promise of rehabilitation.”

Pardhi school bulldozed by Prosperity Highway

ਖ਼ੁਸ਼ਹਾਲੀ ਰਾਜਮਾਰਗ ਦੇ ਬੁਲਡੋਜ਼ਰ ਹੇਠ ਸਹਿਕਦਾ ਪਾਰਧੀ ਸਕੂਲ

ಪ್ರಾಸ್ಪರಿಟಿ ಹೆದ್ದಾರಿಯಿಂದಾಗಿ ನೆಲಸಮವಾದ ಫಾನ್ಸೆ ಪಾರ್ಧಿಯವರ ಶಾಲೆ

பர்தி பள்ளி நெடுஞ்சாலை அமைப்பதற்காக இடிக்கப்பட்டிருக்கிறது

পারধি স্কুলটিকে গুঁড়িয়ে দিল সমৃদ্ধি মহামার্গ

समृद्धि राजमार्ग के बुलडोज़र तले पारधी विद्यालय

سمردھی شاہراہ کے بلڈوزر تلے پاردھی اسکول

সমৃদ্ধি ৰাজপথে মহতিয়াই নিলে পাৰ্ধিৰ বিদ্যালয়

ସମୃଦ୍ଧ ରାଜପଥ ଦ୍ୱାରା ପର୍ଦ୍ଧି ସ୍କୁଲରେ ବୁଲଡ଼ୋଜର ଚାଲିଲା

સમૃદ્ધિ હાઈવે તળે ચગદાઈ પારધી શાળા

समृद्धी महामार्गामुळे पारधी मुलांची शाळा जमीनदोस्त

Nandgaon Khandeshwar

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Pardhi school bulldozed by Prosperity Highway

A school in Amravati district, Maharashtra, started by a Phanse Pardhi teacher for kids from his long-stigmatised and impoverished community, was demolished on June 6, leaving them anxious and uncertain

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