Few teachers to staff schools at construction sites

COIMBATORE: Hands muddy and hair unkempt, four to six-year-old children run around their mothers who are busy cleaning rice for their lunch in the construction workers' settlement at Vedapatti.
"There is no school to go to; it's closed," says Chandra, 5, whose family moved into the settlement when she was one. Many families of construction labourers live in tin-sheet shelters in the settlement, and, like Chandra, none of the children get an education.
The crèche Chandra points to is locked. "It was closed about six months ago," said Kumari Velusamy from Guntur in Andhra Pradesh. "The children could not understand what the teacher saying and vice-versa. After two years of being run erratically, the crèche was closed."
Many learning or bridge centres and crèches set up by builders or by the government's Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan at construction sites to provide education to children of migrant labourers are closed or run intermittently.
SSA officials say they have established seven learning centres in construction sites in Coimbatore and Tirupur districts over the last three years. These are in addition to 72 long-term centres for out-of-school children. However, the centres are struggling as it is difficult to find teachers fluent in Hindi or Telugu, the mother tongue of most of the labourers.
Six-year-old Sareeka Ramu from Jharkhand, who moved into a labourers' colony next to a construction site in Kalinganaickenpalayam two years ago, has still not been to school. The construction site does not have a school and her parents are yet to find a school for her.
Labour department data shows there are about 30,000 migrant labourers in the district working on construction sites or as security personnel or waiters. They hail from Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Odisha, Jharkhand, Assam, Nagaland and Nepal. SSA authorities say there are 556 children of migrant labourers in the school-going age.
"If children are not given education in the formative years, they will never learn. They should ideally be exposed to more vocational courses so that they can earn and break out of this circle," said education consultant Uma Gopalakrishnan.
K Shanmugavelayudham, convenor of Chennai-based TNForces, a forum for childcare services, said, "Builders don't allow government officials or NGOs to set up learning centres at construction sites because they fear that the exploitation at sites will be exposed. They prefer workers who leave their families behind and come to work."
SSA has been ordered by the government to conduct another survey of the number of construction sites in the city. "We have found 26 construction sites of which eight have children. All the others have only men," said Manickam, an SSA official. SSA has plans to find teachers to run the centres.