Due to the spread of COVID-19, the Central government on 24th March 2020 announced a national lockdown, which has now been extended till 17th May.  It has been over seven weeks now since educational institutions have been shut. Students, across the country, are facing uncertainty regarding their examinations and career with schools and colleges being shut but there are some children who are more vulnerable than others, one of them being the students of in tribal or Ashram Schools, under the Ministry of Tribal Affairs in India. 

What are Ashram Schools?

The Supreme court of India in a Writ Petition in 1992 declared Right to Education as a necessary condition for fulfilment of the Right to Life under Article 21. The Union of India passed the Right to (Free and Compulsory) Education Act in 2009 and promised to include all children between 6 and 14 years. Much earlier to that, the fast evolving Indian civil society had underlined that merely writing off tuition fees and providing free books was not enough to ensure that the marginalised children can actually access their right to education. If these sections of population are to achieve a minimum level of human dignity in their life then their children must be provided with food, shelter, clothing, education, play grounds, recreation, health services and other inputs. Way back in 1986, the Govt of India started an effective scheme of providing complete support to the tribal children to enable them to take education and catch up with the rest of the children in the country. 

The Ashram School is a scheme under which the Govt. of India and the State Governments on their own or in collaboration with civil society organizations assume the total responsibility to provide residential education to the children of the people belonging to Scheduled Tribes (ST). It is an education package that aims at ensuring the survival, protection and development of these children while providing formal education up to the higher secondary level, to help them catch up with the children of mainstream society. Today, there are over 5,00,000 tribal children taking education in the state of Maharashtra alone.

Lockdown and Ashram Schools

When the lockdown was announced in March, like all educational institutions, the Ashram Schools were also ordered to be shut and the children were sent home. The schools were tentatively said to resume on 25th May but given the current situation, it seems highly unlikely. When already vulnerable children are sent back home during a crisis, it is  bound to heighten their vulnerability. There seems to be no response to ensuring safety and access to education for these children, beyond sending them back. It is possible that the absence of the education of the tribal children in the discourse is linked to them being governed by a different ministry (Ministry of Tribal Affairs as opposed to Ministry of Human Resources Development).

The Centrally Sponsored Schemes like Ashram School had stated objectives to reduce the divide between the backward communities like the Scheduled Tribes and the mainstream society that was technologically fast developing.  This was also a reflection of the Directive Principles of State Policy (Part IV of the Constitution of India) that directed the state not to have policies that would increase the inequalities now called the divide. However, the divide seems to be increasing with the pandemic, as these children continue to be absent from the discourse. Many of the children that study in Tribal schools come from areas that still have not seen electrification. Sending them home, almost erases their chances to access education amid a crisis. The solution of online learning is an innovative solution that is helping many students across the world but let us not forget that there are many students like the ones in Ashram schools who do not even form a part of the target group of this model. 

Education meets nutrition

Since Ashram schools are residential, they not only provide education but also ensure nutrition for the residing children. The State Govt of Maharashtra vide a circular informing all Anganwadis to deliver their share of the food grains to the families of the anganwadi children by visiting their houses. No such order has been issued to cover the children who have been sent back home from various Ashram schools. Tribals mostly being landless in most parts of the country are highly dependent on daily wage activities in the farm sector. As the agricultural operations have come to a halt the wage labourers have lost their wages from the farm sector. Now they have a sudden extra burden of feeding their children, the returnees from ashram schools.

Prerana’s experiences

Our Sanmaan project works with children who have been rescued from begging. In many of their cases, after substantial efforts, they have managed to get the children enrolled in schools. Many of them stay in Ashram schools but with ashram schools being shut, they are back in the city. In addition to having no or limited access to education and nutrition, their return to the city during the lockdown raises safety concerns too. Many of their families do not even have access to toilets and live on the streets. To expect their parents to access and afford digital technology is not only unfair but speaks of an extremely exclusionary and myopic view of our society which is blind to the harsh socio-economic reality. Many of these families too have a serious problem of accessing government benefits. The current lockdown situation has created indebtedness, and after the lock down they will be preoccupied  with the burden of repaying  their loans.

It is unreasonable to expect that a child who does not have access to proper meals, will be able to access and afford the Information Communication/digital technology to continue education. It is unfair to expect that families with low or no income can afford to treat the education of their children as their priority. While there are many packages focusing on helping the family economically, the education of these children remains ignored. It is hence necessary that these children are also included in the discourse on helping marginalised communities.