School too far from this village, but education isn’t

Nagpur: Last year, three youngsters packed their bags to head for a remote, Naxal-affected village, deep inside Gadchiroli. After finishing their education, they wanted to reach out to those who needed it the most.
Completely cut off from the outside world, with zero educational opportunities, the small Nelgunda village in Bhamragarh tehsil had no teachers nor a school within a radius of 30 kilometres.The area is rich in nature but cursed with inaccessibility. Until, the Amte family, who had already set up the Lokbiradari Prakalp 17km away in Hemalkasa, decided to introduce the villagers to education.
These youngsters are volunteering in an experiment in education started by Dr Prakash Amte’s second daughter-in-law Samiksha Godse Amte. Like the residency school in Hemalkasa, the Sadhana Vidyalaya in Nelgunda has specially designed multilingual textbooks for tribals, with a combination of their own dialect Madia and the Devanagari script. “On the heavy demand of villagers and successful implementation of the program at the residential school at Hemalkasa, we decided to start a similar set up here,” says Aniket Amte, younger son of Dr Prakash Amte.
Living in far away metros, these youngsters were not intrigued by high-profile jobs but by the idea of educating tribal children. “We had just given our final year engineering exams when we saw a post on social media, inviting volunteers for this program. We didn’t think twice before coming here,” says 22-year-old Sanket Joshi, who along with his childhood friend Prafull Gundecha came from Pune in July last year to teach in the tribal areas of Bhamragarh.
Before starting to teach, they spent almost a month learning the tribal language ‘Madia’ so that they could build a rapport with locals. The volunteers stay at Hemalkasa and commute to school everyday. “The village can be approached only on foot or two-wheelers. But in the monsoons, even that is not possible since the entire road gets waterlogged. Last monsoons, we would go everyday to check the water level and see if we could go to the school to teach,” recalls Prafull.
Vaibhavi Pokle, 28, who pursued management studies, had worked in Mumbai for several years. Always wanting to give something back to the society, she came to Nelgunda through a fellowship. “I had no apprehensions about coming here and my family was supportive too. This has been more of a learning process for me,” she says.
The first class was held under a tree in August last year and since then, the students have showed tremendous improvement. “We don’t have four-walled classrooms. The students can sit under their favourite trees, near the cattle sheds or anywhere they want. We don’t follow a fixed time table either. They are free to do what they want to,” says Sanket.
These kids are as smart as their city counterparts and many have the potential to crack competitive exams, feels Vaibhavi. “We are giving them the exposure but without contaminating their culture or lifestyle, which the community is proud of. We focus more on concrete learning rather than abstract,” she adds.
The young facilitators feel that education is the only way to positively influence these kids living in an extremism-affected district.