Tomorrow is going to be a big day for Kajal, Kavita, Sumit, Shiva and their 4 friends who will finally be able to enroll themselves in a school. I along with my fellow volunteers at CRY will be getting them admitted to the Khezarabad MCD School.
Today when I went to the community at Taimoor Nagar to enlist the names of the children who have not yet been admitted to any primary school, I saw a number of them playing in the narrow lanes of the unregistered slum. These were supposed to be the school hours for most children of their age. I realized that this task was almost done for me. But to my surprise or dismay I was told that not even one of them needed an admission. In fact all of them were already enrolled. Somebody there told me that most of them there couldn’t even spell or write their name properly. Just then I remembered something similar which I had witnessed earlier, my perception for which had totally changed after I saw this. I was however able to list out the names of the ‘Lucky 8’(The literacy rate of India suggests that most people here have not been so ‘Lucky’).
I would now tell you that ‘something similar’ which I already seemed to have gone through. It was rather an experience back in April last year when I used to volunteer for another NGO. There I happened to teach a child who was in his 3rd standard. Having started my duty in high spirits, after just two weeks I was all out of patience. Not because I was bored, rather it was because each day we sat to study, I had to remind them the basic alphabets. He knew far less than most of the other children of his age do. At that time all I could do was pity him for his lack of attention. Maybe he could not grasp things as quickly as his classmates.
But it was today that I got the reason behind Nikhil’s condition. Is it that somewhere we are failing in assessing the children right? Mere promoting them to next level or class will not solve the problem but an honest attempt to assess them right and to bringing them at par with other children will definitely make a difference.
Unhappy and highly dissatisfied with our present education system, I thought that maybe our efforts to enroll those 8 students to school would make no difference at all. But then I saw a ray of hope. I noticed that I had already started calling them ‘students’. Even if 3 of them know the real value of good education, it would indeed bring forth a difference. I also realized that working here for only 6 months had made me all the more aware of child rights and the importance of human resource development. Today I know about the elements which make our ‘Right’ a ‘Wrong’. Having penned down my experience, I am sure I have been able to make many people like you more aware. As somebody once said ‘Being alive is a common road. It's our awareness that makes us different.’
Now I have to gear up for tomorrow, its going to be a big day.
Abhinav Kapoor
CRY-Child Rights and You is an Indian NGO that believes that every child regardless of gender, class or economic status has the right to survival, protection, development and participation - thus a childhood. For over 30 years, CRY has partnered with more than 300 grassroot -level NGOs to ensure the rights of over 20,00,000 children by working with their parents and communities they live in, to make this a reality.
