PEECHARA, INDIA – Unlike most 12-year-olds, Renuka Goud, a Lambadi gypsy girl, doesn’t like summer vacation from school.
“Going to school is so much fun,” says Renuka, playing with a piece of mirror on her bright pink skirt. “It is more fun than playing with my friends!”
The sadness in her eyes reflects how deeply she misses her school. Her excitement might have to do with the fact that she doesn't attend class in an ordinary building. And she doesn’t take a school bus to commute.
Rather, her school is a large, yellow bus. Called the School on Wheels, it roams from village to village, bringing education to the doorsteps of children in rural areas who do not attend formal school.
“My daughter has nothing on her mind but the school,” says Renuka’s mother, Kalabai Goud, looking proudly at her daughter. “She even talks of the school in her sleep.”
This is something new in the Goud family. Renuka’s mother never went toschool. In fact, nobody in the history of her family ever knew how to read or write.
Mobility had been in the veins of the Lambadis for centuries. A nomadic community, they are believed to have their roots in the Romas of Eastern Europe. Until a few decades ago, they moved from place to place, herding goats and transporting food via ox carts.
But today, the community has a more settled life, with the majority of them even maintaining a permanent address. The Indian government has granted the Lambadis the official status of a tribal community, which, according to the Indian Constitution, entitles them to several privileges, including quotas in government jobs.
Yet, education has eluded most of the Lambadis, owing to their remote locations and also the low priority of schooling among the community members.
In the Goud family as well, this cycle of illiteracy continued for centuries until one day in March, when the mobile school reached Peechara, the village in southern India where the family lives. Following an informal discussion between the school teacher and Renuka's family elders, the little girl jumped on the bus, starting a new journey of her own aboard the School on Wheels.
The school, launched by the local Rotary Club of Hanamkonda, attracts children with an air-conditioned bus brimming with educational and recreational tools. There are textbooks, books with colored illustrations, posters, maps and even CDs. In addition, there are toys and other sports equipment, including balls, cricket kits, badminton rackets, board games and slides.
But what Renuka likes best about her school is the “big TV.” Indeed, keeping up with its unconventional character, the School on Wheels teaches children through the audiovisual medium.
Within two months of its launch, the school already covers 84 villages, according to the Rotary Club of Hanamkonda. Every day, it visits two or three villages, spending three to four hours at each teaching children, interacting with the community and discussing the importance of education with locals.
B. Sridevi, a teacher in the school, says the program targets a wide audience.
“We hold a common class for children of all ages,” she says. “So, we teach things that will benefit everyone: alphabets, numbers, basic science, etc.”
She says that the curriculum also reaches beyond academics.
“We also teach them about child rights, basic hygiene and health,” she says.
The teachers strive to be creative in conveying these lessons to students during class.
“Since they attend it only for a few hours a week, we try to see that whatever they learn will not be forgotten easily,” she says. “This is why we use CDs, and we know they will keep talking about it with their families and friends over the next few days.”
Started as a strategy to educate children in slums, mobile schools are now bringing education to gypsy families – in many cases for the first time. Various state and local governments and nongovernmental organizations are operating schools aboard buses, which appeal to gypsy communities for their flexibility, informality and free tuition. Children learn the basics from reading to hygiene, and parents say they are learning too. There are still many children to reach, but program coordinators say they are optimistic about the potential of schools on wheels to revolutionize education in rural India.
The literacy rate among Indians ages 15 to 24 is 88 percent for males and 74 percent for females, according to UNICEF. The net attendance ratio in primary school is 85 percent for boys and 81 percent for girls.
The concept of nonformal, mobile schools in India isn’t entirely new. A nongovernmental organization called Plan India launched the first mobile school in Mumbai in 1998 to educate the city’s underprivileged children, says Indrani Roy, an alternative education enthusiast who made a video documentary on the school.
Roy says that many children in low-income families can’t attend school because of responsibilities at home.
“For families that live in slums and on the street, everyone must earn a living since the jobs they do are extremely low-paid,” she says. “Now, while the parents leave for work, the children become the guardians, looking after their younger siblings, fetching drinking water and also keeping an eye on their belongings.”
She says this makes traditional education impossible.
“This leaves no time for them to attend school,” she says. “The mobile school targeted those children, went to their slums and the street corners, where the children could learn without leaving their homes.”
This concept of bringing education to children, instead of the other way around, has since motivated various nongovernmental organizations to launch mobile schools, targeting mostly children in slums.
In 2007, mobile schools started to reach out to nomadic tribes. That year, the government of Jhabua, a tribal district in central India, launched a fleet of 22 mobile schools, with funding from UNICEF. The fleet targeted tribal families who, like the Lambadi gypsies, frequently migrate, which makes it difficult for their children to attend formal school.
The mobile schools reached the tents where the migrant families set up their temporary homes. The instructors transformed the tents into classrooms, and the children – many of whom had dropped out of their previous schools when their parents moved – received basic education.
The fleet is no longer in operation, but the success of the UNICEF project inspired Andhra Pradesh state to launch its own mobile school service in 2008, according to the state’s Labour Department.
Anil Kumar Pathlavat, a livelihood trainer and consultant in Hyderabad, the state capital, hails from the Lambadi community. He says the mobile school system appeals to families in his home community for several reasons.
“There are three big reasons why a mobile school attracts a Lambadi family,” he says. “First, in formal school system, a child needs some help and support to do his homework. Since most of the Lambadi families are nonliterate, the unconventional method of education provided through a mobile school works better as the child learns right at the school.”
Another reason is flexibility.
“Secondly, the family doesn’t have to worry about how to send the child to school,” he says. “Or if it moves from one place to another, there is no issue of getting a transfer certificate or finding a new school, etc.”
The informal system is also more conducive to the community’s lifestyle.
“Finally,” he says, “a nonformal method of schooling goes very well with the living style of the Lambadis, who live close to the nature and are known to prefer a more open and direct form of communication than one riddled with bureaucratic terms.”
Saranya Naik, is an 8-year-old Lambadi boy living in Hyderabad. Saranya moved to the city three years ago with his parents, who were in search of employment. They found jobs as construction workers.
The family doesn’t own a home in the city, so they live in a tent pitched next to their job site. Once they finish work at one site, they move to another. The constant movement made it impossible for Saranya to attend a formal school.
But thanks to the government-run mobile school, Saranya has been able to attend school for the past six months.
The Labour Department of Andhra Pradesh state provides the school with a list of construction sites within the city. The school visits all the sites every day, spending a few hours at each location. This way, the mobile school provides basic education to the workers’ children ages 8 to 12.
Saranya, who dreams of becoming a cricketer some day, says that he joined the school because they had cricket balls and bats. But now, he enjoys reading books, drawing pictures and doing math.
“I like when the teacher calls me to write on the blackboard,” he says. “I like to do sums and draw pictures on the sketchbook that the teacher gives us.”
Saranya says he is eager to return to his village so that he can show off his newly learned skills of reading and writing to all his friends and relatives.
“I want to recite everything I have learned here: alphabets, rhymes and how to tell time,” he says.
And he hasn’t just learned basic subjects. He has also internalized other important information, such as hygiene tips, which he is itching to share as well.
“I also want to tell them that they should wash their hands before eating food,” he says, with excitement gleaming in his eyes.
The mobile schools are educating and enchanting children – and even adults.
Rahul Bojja, a senior government official who inaugurated the mobile schools in Andhra Pradesh, says that the community elders are also welcoming the schools on the wheels, and in some cases, learning a little themselves.
Mudassar Ali, a tribal Muslim teacher in Gujarat state in western India, agrees with Bojja. Three years ago, the school where Ali works launched a special program called Learning Through Videos. Shot in the village itself, each video focused on a particular lesson that children found difficult to learn.
The program became an instant hit with the children and also their parents, especially those from the gypsy community. There is a large population of Rabaari gypsies in Ali’s village.
“They found it fascinating that a school could teach through films, and this made them send their children to our school,” he says. “In fact, when we shot a video, some of the gypsy parents would offer to act in the video. They told us that it made them learn things.”
Besides the unconventional teaching style and delivery of education at the children’s doorsteps, there is another reason why the gypsies love the mobile school: It is free. Most gypsy families live in near poverty, earning meager incomes as petty traders, goat herders or farm laborers, Pathlavat says. In many families, children under 14 work as farmhands, picking cotton or weeding, in order to contribute to the family’s income.
Renuka used to work in a cotton field alongside her mother – until she joined the School on Wheels. The teachers convinced her parents that child employment was illegal.
But there are still many children engaged in labor instead of enrolled in school.
“There are hundreds of other children like Renuka still picking cotton who should be attending schools,” says Sameer Kumar of Amrutha Bindu Laxmi Ranganayakamma Charitable Trust, the nongovernmental organization that has partnered with the Rotary club to operate the mobile school that Renuka attends.
But Kumar is optimistic. Going by the signs, mobile schools are slowly turning into a movement that could significantly change the educational landscape in rural India, especially among gypsies here.
“We have drawn a map of 7,980 villages where our Schools on Wheels will impart education,” Kumar says. “So far, we have received huge support from the locals.”
