Lost in translation – The Hindu

Avinash Shrirame, 35, enters the room that holds about 30 students wearing red-and-green checked uniforms. They greet him with a loud “Good morning, Sir,” and a “Jai seva” shouted out thrice, to the rhythm of clapping. Shrirame asks students to open their textbooks as he turns to the blackboard. Flanking the board are portraits of Rani Durgavati, the queen of Gondwana who fought the Mughals in the 16th century; and Baburao Shedmake, a Gond chieftain who rose against the British in the 1857 war.

Shrirame is a volunteer on an honorarium, teaching Gondi in the Paramparik Koya Dnyanbodh Sanskar Ghotul School in Mohgaon, Gadchiroli. Gondi is the language of the Gonds, a tribe spread across at least seven States, including Karnataka, where the first standardised dictionary was published in 2018 by Kannada University. India has the world’s second-largest tribal population, at 8.9%, as per the 2011 Census.

The summer sun shines on the pink walls of Shrirame’s classroom, with children from Classes 3 to 5 attending the Gondi language class. “The last four years have been difficult,” says Shrirame, who arrived a year ago, from Bhiwapur town, 165 km away, after working in a bank for six years. He is a certified Computer Operator and Programming Assistant from the Industrial Training Institute (ITI), Nagpur.

“We have been caught up in litigation, and it feels like the school is stagnant because of it,” he says. He remembers his own childhood and his confusion at not being able to understand English, the medium of education. “Other children my age were thinking of the moon, I was just petrified of grammar,” says Shrirame, who has learnt Gondi over the last year.

The school is the only one in Maharashtra that teaches Gondi. It is run up to Class 5, by the Sanyukt Ganrajya Gram Sabha Parishad, a grouping of 15 gram sabhas (village councils, at the basic level of tribal governance), including Mohgaon.

In 2022, the school got a notice from Maharashtra’s Education Department saying it was not registered with the zila parishad, an elected body at the apex of village-level governance at the district level. The notice asked for it to be shut.

The Gram Sabha Parishad filed a petition in the HC in November 2022 asking for recognition. The case is still on, and the school’s plan to start Class 6 has been delayed indefinitely. The teachers worry that the 16 children in Class 5 will have to leave the school if they cannot start Class 6.

The seven-room ghotul reconnects school-going members of the Gond tribe with their language that is in danger of being subsumed by Marathi, much like the other States where Gonds are. Thirty lakh people speak this language with its roots in the Dravidian language family, says Karnataka-based researcher Ganesh Narayandas Devy, who headed the People’s Linguistic Survey of India, which provides an overview of at-risk languages.

The school runs on the Tribal Department’s ashram shala syllabus, teaching regular subjects such as Mathemathics, History, English, and Marathi. The books for these subjects are supplied by the Department free of cost, as is the norm. Gondi is an addition. The syllabus for Gondi was brought in from a school in Chhattisgarh’s Sarona village, Kanker district, about 250 km from Mohgaon. There is no teacher’s training for Gondi, so Shrirame learns from the elders in the tribe and uses YouTube to help him with teaching methods. All the teachers use Gondi as an informal way of teaching students, so they can easily grasp the concepts.

Mother tongue matters

The idea of establishing a Gondi-centric school stemmed from the need to revive the language and pass on the Gond culture to children and the youth, to protect the language and knowledge from extinction. The Gram Sabha Parishad passed a resolution to start the school in February 2020. A year later, they wrote a letter to then State Governor Bhagat Singh Koshyari for approval of the residential English-medium school.

In the letter, the village representatives stated that India was a signatory to the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples adopted by the United Nations on September 13, 2007. The tribal community, therefore, had the right to establish and control an independent school to educate its students using their native language. It was inaugurated in February 2021 by Namdeo Usendi, then MLA from the Congress.

Scheduled Areas — predominantly occupied by tribals — are governed by the Panchayat (Extension to Scheduled Areas, PESA) Act, 1996. This says that the gram sabha would “exercise command over natural resources, resolve disputes and manage institutions under it like schools and cooperatives”. The Gram Sabha Parishad says the school is a constitutional body, as it comes under PESA.

However, the Education Department says that the school does not fall under the Right to Education (RTE) Act, 2009, as it is not registered. In the notice sent, the Department said the school was violating Section 18 (5) of the Right to Free and Compulsory Education of Children Act, 2009. This section stipulates that anyone who establishes a school without a certificate of recognition will have to pay a fine of ₹1 lakh in arrears and ₹10,000 per day if it continues to operate.

Between the laws

“Why has the Education Department penalised us? Our region falls under the Scheduled Area, and self-governance is constitutional,” says Devsai Aatla, 47, a member of the Gram Sabha Parishad and the owner of the land on which the school operates. His grandchildren study here.

Walking along the banks of the pond behind the classroom, Devsai says that since the country’s independence 75 years ago, no effort has been made to preserve Gondi language. “Marathi is not our identity, but the government keeps imposing it on us,” Devsai says, adding that because of this, Gond history remains undocumented. Zila parishad Deputy Education Officer Vivek Nakade says, “We did not receive any proposal for the school. In our routine scrutiny, we found the school operation unauthorised, and then sent the notice.” Nakade says the government is not against schools: “All we require is the registration under the RTE Act.”

Gondi is not among India’s 22 official languages in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution. However, the National Education Policy of 2022 recommended “the promotion of multilingualism in education at every level so that learners get the opportunity to study in their own language(s)”. To promote mother-tongue-based learning in the early years, primers (textbooks) in 104 dialects have been developed. While Gondi-Odia has a primer, the dialect spoken in Maharashtra does not.

The Gram Sabha Parishad wants the Unified District Information System for Education Plus (UDISE+) code based on the PESA Act. “This will help students get admission to courses after graduating from school. We would also be able to expand beyond Class 5 with minimal difficulty,” says Devsai. Under UDISE, the Ministry of Education collects school details related to its resources and assigns a number to the school, so it is counted. A Gram Sabha Parishad member and a parent of a student, Maniram Aatla, 35, points out that the school is established on the lines of a ghotul, a community space for socialising, sharing knowledge, and engaging in cultural activities.

Resources and funding

In the room next to the pink-walled classroom, “A, ara”; “e, era”; and “u, ura” are Gondi words that are being chanted. A six-year-old says “a”, and the class replies in chorus, “ara”, sitting on the floor amid books and bags. The wall has Gondi and English alphabet charts. The room works as a classroom for first and second-grade students during school hours, doubling as a hostel for girls after school.

The residential school operates from three rooms, accommodating 69 students: 31 girls and 38 boys. Devsai claims, “We have many people inquiring about admissions, but we are not admitting any more, because the litigation has made things uncertain.”

The students come from over 20 villages across Gadchiroli district, including Pendhari and Hadapeth in Dhanora block, and Rekhabhatal and Kasansur in Etapalli block, at least 65 km from Mohgaon.

The school is funded by the incomes of all the villages that are a part of the Gram Sabha Parishad. From March until the first half of June, people from these 15 villages come together to collect tendu leaves, used for wrapping bidis. The leaves are wrapped in bundles of 70 each, given to the village gram sabha, and later brought to the Gram Sabha Parishad, where it is sold.

The money earned is distributed among villagers, according to how much they collected, after keeping 5%. This is used to fund the school. The school is supported by stationery donations from NGOs. Some parents too make contributions. Devsai says, “We require infrastructure to accommodate more students and funds to pay teachers what they deserve.”

Culture and competition

The Hindu’s analysis of UDISE data reveals that, in 2022, dropout rates among ST girls in Maharashtra were higher than the national average by the secondary stage of schooling. Additionally, the gap in dropout rates between girls of the unreserved category and the ST category in the State is significantly wider than the national average. Furthermore, the rate at which Maharashtra has narrowed this gap over the past eight years has been significantly slower compared to the progress made at the national level.

“Students turn their backs on education due to language difficulties,” says Sheshrao Gawade, 28, who teaches Science and Gondi at the school. “Teaching children in Gondi can help us explore so many opportunities and this school will be a great experiment. We have so many plans. We want to introduce Gond knowledge on medicinal plants and herbs,” he says.

In Pendhari village, about 5 km from the school, Manda Aatla, 38, sits near the murmunda (a wooden pillar with floral carvings) in the centre of the hut that supports the thatched roof. Murmunda (mur is marriage in Gond) is a symbol of marriage, installed during the wedding ceremony at the man’s parents’ home.

Manda has just come home after collecting Mahua flowers throughout the day. These are used year-round to cook with and make juices and alcohol. Manda takes pride in her son’s familiarity with the Gondi script. She can only speak the language. She shows off her 10-year-old son’s workbook and says, “Gondi is making it easy for him to learn other languages. He quickly understands when English words are explained in it.”

Over 35 km from Pendhari, is Kasansur village, where another parent, Naresh Narote, 45, says his nine-year-old daughter, who studies at the Gondi-medium school, grasps concepts quicker compared to his other daughter studying in Etapalli Zila Parishad School.

One of the reasons for this is the extracurricular activities that integrate their lives at home with their curricula. Students take part in songs, storytelling, and dances. “We have folklore that talks about the evolution of humans, gravitation, mythology, and the art of living,” adds Devsai.

A Tribal Department officer, on condition of anonymity, says, “When we visited the school, students seemed cheerful. Students don’t feel pressured.” He says one way of registering the school is to go the ashram shala route, residential schools created for tribals. “It is bizarre that PESA can facilitate the decisions concerning jal (water), jungle, jameen (land) but not education. This would be an experiment, and the government should think on these lines,” Devy says.

(With inputs from Vignesh R.)

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Edited by Sunalini Mathew