Bihar: Brilliant performance by 'musahar' children in CBSE class X results

PATNA : Students of Shoshit Samadhan Kendra (SSK) , a fully free English medium residential school for the poorest of the poor, the children of the ‘musahar’ community of Bihar have achieved brilliant results at the CBSE examinations for class X.
For the first time, students, are all first generation learners appeared for the class X CBSE examination and out of 15, eight students scored more than 90%, five got more than 80% and two scored 75%.
All the students took their examinations in English medium. SSK was established in 2007 and this is first batch which has passed-out from the school., said the founder director of the school Jyoti Sinha (Retd IPS). The school got affiliation to CBSE in 2015.
On July 16 2007, SSK , a free residential school, was established for the Mushar community. It was inaugurated by the then Bihar governor R S Gavai. The school provides education, boarding, lodging, clothes, books, and medical support for the children.
The school has 350 students from class I-X. The children at SSK have been selected from 8-10 remote villages in Bihar. It is an English medium school where the subjects taught are Literature, Grammar, spoken English, Hindi, Science, Mathematics, Social and Environmental Studies, and General Knowledge, Sinha told TOI.
Weekly lessons are imparted in drawing, painting, and music. The schools provide facilities for audio-visual teaching using an LCD projector and a computer. By these efforts, SSK aims to change the profile of this community.
Among the vast poverty ridden population of Bihar, the most exploited and deprived is the Musahar community. They are landless labourers living in sub-human conditions for centuries. They are called Musahars because they are skilled in catching and killing field rats (in Bihari dialect called Mus) and eating them too due to lack of enough food.
Deprived of both capital and education (literacy rate being only 5%), SSK believes that the only way to uplift this community is by providing high quality education coupled with vocational training, he said.