Shortage of textbooks in schools in Banda shows the farcical state of primary education in rural Bundelkhand.
Students in a primary school in Banda. Credit: Khabar Lahariya
“Today, he’ll take the maths book home. Tomorrow, I will.”
A peculiar sharing business is going on between young students in Banda district in the state of Uttar Pradesh. At Naraini’s junior school and Pachokhar’s primary school in the district, there is a dearth of textbooks, forcing the children to take turns at studying.
It’s been over four months since the new session began, but the students are yet to receive their books. Geeta, a teacher at the Pachokhar school, is miffed at the questioning. “Well, the main reason for not getting books”, she says, “is that the books have not been made available to us by the government.”
According to the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act (RTE) of 2009, children between the ages of six and 14 are eligible to basic education, free of charge. This includes school uniforms and of course, textbooks. But here, deep inside the innards of the country’s most populous state, not only are there not enough textbooks, parents have also faced the pressure to buy them. Girja, eight-year-old Aryan’s guardian, tells us that her son comes home everyday with the same plea that has turned into a demand of late, “You must buy the books now. The teacher will surely punish me tomorrow if you don’t.” Durjan, the father of another child, is an empathetic soul – he understands the school’s dilemma. “We’ve spoken to the teachers and schools, but what can they do?”
Meanwhile, Aryan’s peer and friend Ishrat holds up the two books she possesses and tells us there should be a total of six, “Abhi toh chaar nahi hai (There are four left),” she tells us. But how will she study the missing subjects?, we ask. She shrugs. Arti, on the other hand, has done the Maths. Unfazed, she presents a solution, “The teacher writes it all out on the blackboard and we note it down in our copies. Then we go home and read that.”
Entire textbooks written out on blackboards and then copied off? How would the syllabus progress?
The headmaster at Naraini’s junior school has thought this through, “What we do is teach new children from old books, so that the children going to the next class leave them for the children coming in. We are able to complete the course this way.”
Some of the students at Naraini have come up with an ingenious trick – the sharing of textbooks. So if Raju has ganit (mathematics) on Mondays, Seema will revise vigyaan (science), and so on and so forth. As Geeta confessed, “If we have no books, we have to make arrangements. Often, a book has to be kept between two children or even a group of five or six.”
Desperate times, desperate measures.
When we went to meet the officer at the Basic Shiksha Parishad in Chilla, Banda, Shushant Babu, also the keeper of textbooks and the statistics, mumbled numbers, off-camera: “There has been a demand for books since June 5 and two lakh sixty five thousand books had arrived, out of which about one lakh ninety thousand five hundred and eighty have already been allocated”. As for the rest? “When they come, they will be distributed,” he said.
But it’s been over four months, term exams are around the corner, and parents fear the books will come too late, or not at all. The children are anxious. “How will we understand?”, asks Aryan. Arti too has a simple question: “What do we read and how do we take the exams?”
This piece first appeared on Khabar Lahariya.
Khabar Lahariya is a rural, video-first digital news organisation with an all-women network of reporters in eight districts of Uttar Pradesh.