A model tribal school in Maharashtra battles water scarcity to fight migration

Six-year-old Ananya Gavit can write with both her hands, read English textbooks meant for sixth graders and recite articles from the Constitution of India. Like her, 59 children who come to the Zilla Parishad School in Hiwali, a remote tribal hamlet in Maharashtra’s Tryambakeshwar taluka in Nashik district, find second home here. They are protected from seasonal migration. The school runs 365 days of the year, 12 hours a day, providing two meals to all the enrolled children. There are no weekends, no public holidays. The teachers come every day, so do students, many from as far as 22 km. In fact, one parent from a tribal district which is over 110 km away from this school, has taken a room on rent in the hamlet to ensure education for his child. The dropout rate is zero, prides the school. The focus is on activity-based, experiential and hands-on learning, with an emphasis on vocational training, agriculture. The children are also prepared for competitive examinations.

The impact of the school and the attention it has garnered, has led to the transformation of the entire village. Hiwali has been declared as a zero-addiction village by the Zilla Parishad. Villagers have started community programmes. They have started sending all their children to school. The nameplate on each house now has the name of the daughter. So far, teachers from 128 schools from Nashik have visited this tribal school to emulate the model.

But, the school is now fighting water scarcity, an issue which scares the teachers. They fear that if it is not addressed, it will ruin years of painstaking efforts and hard work to bring the children into mainstream, and will lead to migration among the children yet again. Their asks — a KT dam and solar power. A KT dam, or Kolhapur-Type Weir, is a low-cost, gravity-based riverbed structure developed in Kolhapur, that acts as a small dam or barrage to store post-monsoon river flow for irrigation and water supply.

“Earlier, we would see the seasonal migration of children along with their parents, when their parents would go to the cities looking for daily wage jobs. But now, one of the parents stays back to bring the children to school. One parent from Surgana, which is 110 km from here, has rented a room in the hamlet, so his child does not miss education even for a single day. Children come in the morning, have breakfast, learn and play here, have lunch, sleep in the school for some time, do vocational training, learn local arts, agriculture, eat something and then go back home,” Keshav Kalibai Chandar Gavit, the teacher who is credited with turning the school around, said.

Unique school

It is a unique school for the style of pedagogy and the level of engagement of the children. It has been carefully built over the last two decades to bring the children of tribal labourers into mainstream education by using innovative means. There are open classrooms and children are encouraged to switch groups and classrooms for community studies. Not an inch of the school premise is left free. Every corner is utilised to spread educational concepts. The rooftops have drawings of the solar system. The pillars have figures and letters in 15 different languages. The walls have maps and mathematical equations, among other things. There is a computer lab, a community hall, a few farms. A separate shed acts as a workshop for the vocational training of the children. They are taught abacus, plumbing, electric fitting, welding, masonry, vermicompost, cooking, among other skills.

FLN or Foundational Literacy and Numeracy, which takes into account the essential skills in reading, writing, and basic math that children need to master by around Grade 3 to succeed in school and life, is excellent. For example, a first grader is expected to read small sentences consisting of four-five simple words. Here, the first graders read books meant for Grade 5 or Grade 6. While they are expected to know numbers till 99, they know four digit numbers, solve addition and subtraction sums for six digit numbers, and do multiplication of two digit numbers with single digit numbers. Under the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, these skills are given significance for the parameters of learning, cognitive development, and life outcomes.

The man behind the school

When the school was first started in 1998, it was a single-teacher school for one tribal hamlet, and had 16 students on roll. But after the appointment of Keshav Gavit in 2009, it has flourished into a three-teacher school now. The number of enrolments have jumped up five times. The high point of the success is the complete halt in migration of children and zero dropout rate.

Mr. Gavit himself is a tribal from a nearby village who worked as a daily wage labourer before preparing for competitive examinations. After he failed to clear the Maharashtra State Public Service Commission exam, he gave an exam to become a teacher. In his journey as a teacher, he tried to implement the learnings from his failure while preparing for competitive exams, and devised several measures to help experiential learning for children. “Both parts of the children’s brains have been activated now. They can write different content in two different languages with both the hands simultaneously, even as they recite a completely different poem while writing,” he said.

The teachers are now worried that the efforts taken for the last two decades might go in vain if the persistent water scarcity issue is not resolved. “For sustainability, water woes need to be resolved urgently. We get a lot of rainfall, but since we are on a slope, water can’t be stored. If water can be stored, people won’t need to migrate. We need water desperately. We have pumps, but there is frequent electricity outage, so we can’t use the pumps to draw water. We want a small dam and solar powered pumps to resolve our water problem,” Mr. Gavit said. The work for deepening of a well is going on under the Jal Jeevan Mission at present, but there is no proposal for the construction of a small dam.

When asked, Nashik Chief Executive Officer Omkar Pawar told The Hindu that efforts were on to draw a line to give tap water to each household. “This region has hard rock. So there are challenges for the storage of water. There is heavy rainfall, but water cannot be conserved. But if the village wants a small dam, the administration can definitely help to get that done. It is a model school for us. We are proud of it. It is entirely the teacher’s credit that children are so well-educated. We will want the school to flourish,” he said.