Priti David

Sharmila Joshi

Editor

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It’s back to school for a few young Adivasi men in Sittilingi valley.
This time though, it’s not for an education
but to build the new premises for the Thulir school.

Among them is 29-year-old A. Perumal, an electrician putting in place
the wires and conduits one morning. “See the small ventilator at ground level?
With it, even the smallest kids can get fresh air,” he says. Perumal has set
aside his much-in-demand  repairs of
televisions and fans in Sittilingi valley to come and work at the building
site.  

Nearby, M. Jaybal, 24, a sought-after mason familiar with using
compacted mud bricks, is giving shape to pillars with designs in mud oxide,
though he never held art paper and crayons in the government school he attended
in the valley. He also pitches in as a carpenter at the new school building,
where he has been working since the first stone was laid in December 2016. He and the others get Rs. 500 for
eight hours of work, and they come in whenever required.

Their first lessons in the mechanics of building
originated in the Thulir after-school programme, started in 2004. Here, Jaybal and other students from the primary and middle-level classes of the local government
school in Sittilingi would explore science through hands-on experiments, art
though drawing, and language through books.

By 2015, the Thulir ‘centre for learning’ (‘thulir’ means the ‘young shoot
of a plant), a primary
school till Class 5, was set-up in Sittilingi. The valley, in a remote corner
of Tamil Nadu’s Dharmapuri district, has a total population of roughly 10,000 living in 21 clusters
– 18 of these are Malayali hamlets, two are Lambadi tandas and one is a Dalit
hamlet.The men at work
on the building all belong to the Malayali community, among the most poorly
educated in the state, with
just 51.3 per literacy (Census 2011). At 357,980, Malayalis are the single largest tribal population
of Tamil Nadu’s  total ST population of
794,697. They mainly live in Dharmapuri, North Arcot, Pudukottai, Salem,
South Arcot and Tiruchirapalli districts. “The first thing I learnt [in the after-school programme] was how to fix
a pipe using an ‘elbow joint’ to water plants,” remembers 27-year-old M. Sakthivel,
a teacher in the Thulir school, who who grew up in Mulla Sittilingi, a Malayali
Adivasi hamlet. Sakthivel is perched atop a ladder, removing a solar
panel and battery which he has to shift to the new school building, around a
kilometre away from its present rented premises in the valley. The new school
has plenty of expensive equipment and a solar night light will help ward off
thieves, Sakthivel says.

Not far from him, Kumar A., 28, is measuring, cutting and bending iron
flats and bars for the window grills. He and his co-workers quip about how the the
spaces left as windows will be perfect for a seven-year-old to wriggle through
when they want to explore the outdoors.Exploring was not an option in the Sittilingi government primary school
that Kumar, Perumal, Jaybal and Sakthivel attended. The classrooms were crowded,
the teachers were mostly absent, school was a distressing experience. When it
was  time to move on to secondary school,
they chose to drop-out. Shaktivel says, “I couldn’t understand what happened in
class and I hated exams.” Perumal adds, “My parents are not educated, so there
was no way to make up [studies] at home either.”Across the country, the drop-out
rate for Scheduled Tribe students in primary schools is 6.93 per cent. It jumps
to 24.68 per cent in secondary school (as against 4.13 per cent and 17.06 per
cent for all students in India), says a 2018 report titled Education Statistics at a Glance  by the Ministry
of Human Resource Development. It says, ‘[the] cause [of high drop-out
rate is] not just engagement in domestic activities but also lack of interest
in education’.   





























“We just sat in one place the whole day, nothing much was taught,” Jaybal
says. Sittilingi’s former panchayat president, P. Thenmozhi, adds, “At
the end of Class 8, I could not even write my name in English.”

If students did manage to continue studying, it meant a 10-kilometre
walk through the reserved forest to the government high school in Kottapatty. Taking a bus
brought them to school too early or too late. (In 2010, the government school that
Jaybal and others attended was extended to Class 10.) Sittilingi valley is
hemmed in by the densely forested Kalrayan and Sitteri hills. In the past, the
only approach into the valley was from the north – off national highway 45A
going from Krishnagiri to Tiruvannamalai . An extended road opened in 2003 to the south and merged
with state highway 79 which skirts Salem (80 kilometres away) and the
industrial textile belt of Tiruppur,
Erode and Avinashi.These regions require labourers in large numbers. The new road made it
easy for people to migrate for work, says village elder R. Dhanalakshmi, 65.
Her three sons dropped out by Class 7 and left to become truck cleaners; her
four girls dropped out and helped on the land, where the family grows rice,
sugarcane, lentils and vegetables. “When the rains failed, a lot of people
would migrate...” Dhanalakshmi says.A 2015 Tamil Nadu migration survey, funded by the State Planning Commission,
notes that 32.6 per cent of
migrants have cleared just Class 8. And their average age is around 14 – the legal age
to seek employment in India in many sectors. With no job skills, many become
construction workers – the
single highest category of unskilled labour that absorbs one in 10 migrants from
the state.



























Jaybal left school after Class 8 and went to Kerala,
where he could only find work as a helper at construction sites, earning Rs.
1,500 a week. Unhappy with the work and living conditions, he returned in six
months to cultivate his family’s five-acre farmland. Perumal too went to Kerala
at the age of 17. “I worked as a daily wage labourer, clearing land and cutting
trees and earned 500 rupees a day. But it was very tiring and I came back a
month later for Pongal [the harvest festival] and stayed [to work on the family
three-acre farmland].”

Sriram R. was unable to pass Class 12, so he dropped out of school and went
to Tiruppur, 200 kilometres away. “I worked in a textile machine-making unit
for six months and earned 1,500 a week,” he says. “I developed an allergy to
the cotton fibre and had to return home.”For these boys who had dropped out of school and tried migrating with
little success, architect couple T. Krishna, 53, and S. Anuradha, 52 – who
founded Thulir and had seen about 500 of Sittilingi’s youngsters completing
their after-school programme, came up with a ‘basic technology’ (BT) course. It
involved one year of practical training in electronics, electricals, construction
and allied subjects. “We thought if they can learn a skill that will allow them
to work and earn right here, they would not need to migrate,” says Krishna.The first BT course kicked off with 12 students in 2006 (65 boys and 20
girls have ‘graduated’ so far). The students began with fixing cycles and moved
to learning about sustainable architecture using mud, cement and debris (from the
digging of local wells). Basic engineering drawing skills, how to read a plan
view or section in an architectural drawing, current ratings of switches and
sockets, safety procedures and so on were learnt on site at building projects
within the valley such as the Tribal Health Initiative, the Sittlingi Organic
Farmers Association and the <a href="https://ruralindiaonline.org/articles/stitching-together-an-upturn-in-sittilingi-valley">Porgai
Artisans Association</a>.



























During the course, they received a monthly stipend of Rs.
1,000. It was nowhere close to earnings outside the valley – up to Rs. 500 a
day at construction sites – but it helped them to complete the course without
migrating for work.  “I thought I could learn
[a trade] and stay home and earn a living,” Perumal says.

After the course, many became confident learners and returned to formal
education, going on to finish school and college. Two are now primary school teachers
in Thulir. Among them is A. Lakshmi, 28, who says, &quot;I did the BT
course and then finished my schooling. I enjoy science and like teaching it.” Perumal is a skilled and busy electrician who also rents out a tractor,
earning a total of around Rs. 15,000 a month. “After my BT course [in 2007], I
was also able to pass my Class 10 and 12 exams and joined college for a BSc in
Physics in Salem,” he says happily. (He didn’t complete the BSc degree, but
that is another story.)Sakthivel earns Rs. 8,000 working at Thulir, gets to stay home and help
with farming his family’s acre of land. “I can earn extra, sometimes up to 500
rupees a month, fixing mobile phones and doing electrical work.” In
2016, when construction of the new Thulir building was to begin, students in
the BT course were shifted to its site for hands-on learning. Their stipend was
replaced with daily wages of Rs. 300. The rest of the building team were former
BT graduates, except for the carpenter, A. Samykannu (whose son S. Senthil was a BT student). The first phase of the Thulir school building – six classrooms, an
office, a store and an assembly hall is nearly complete. A library, kitchen and
craft rooms are to be added. The cost of Rs. 50 lakhs so far has come from
donors to the Thulir Trust.“Children could not study as
sometimes both parents would migrate,” Thenmozhi says:  “I’m happy that our local boys are learning
new skills. They are here with their families and able to earn.”







































The reporter would like to thank Ram Kumar, teacher at Thulir, and
architecture students Meenakshi Chandra and Dinesh Raja for their assistance in
writing this story.

Taking their skills back to school in Sittilingi

শ্রম আর দক্ষতা নিজেদের স্কুলবাড়ি গড়ছেন দেশান্তরি প্রাক্তন ছাত্ররা

ആര്‍ജ്ജിച്ച തൊഴിലുമായ് സിറ്റിലിങ്കിയിലെ സ്കൂളിലേക്ക് അവർ മടങ്ങിയെത്തുമ്പോൾ

சிட்டிலிங்கியில் உள்ள பள்ளிக்கு தங்களது திறமைகளை மீண்டும் எடுத்துச் செல்கின்றனர்

सिट्टिलिंगी में स्कूल को अपना कौशल लौटाना

سِٹّی لِنگی میں اسکول کو اپنا ہنر لوٹانا

କର୍ମଦକ୍ଷତା ସହ ସିତ୍ତିଲିଙ୍ଗିର ସ୍କୁଲ୍କୁ ସେମାନଙ୍କ ପ୍ରତ୍ୟାବର୍ତ୍ତନ

सित्तिलिंगीच्या शाळेची शिकवण फिरून शाळेसाठी

Sittilingi

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Taking their skills back to school in Sittilingi

Once drop-outs, young Adivasi men in Sittilingi valley of Tamil Nadu are now skilled workers who no longer migrate – and they are building a new school campus using lessons that started in the same school

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