How a school in a remote Tribal Telangana village offers a lesson in getting kids to school

It’s a school with a clean kitchen shed, a huge RO water filter, a kitchen garden with a rich variety of healthy leafy vegetables. There are separate clean washrooms for boys and girls with hand wash to ensure good hygiene standards. The power supply inside the well-maintained school building is regular.

Inside the classrooms, the 64 enrolled students sport uniforms with badges and neatly polished shoes. On the walls of the classrooms, the teaching and learning material prepared by the students is pasted. The daily attendance hovers roughly around 98 per cent and the dropout rate is nil.

This isn’t the scene from some private school, or the inspection day setting in some public school in a metropolitan city. This is a regular scene from a school in Bandarugudem village, which until recently was completely off the map.

The village in the remote forest area of Bhadradri Kothagudem district in Telangana had little existence beyond revenue records. But the Tribal village with a population of 999 has scripted a success story that is not just being appreciated but also replicated.

Thanks to the efforts of school principal, Bekkanti Srinivasa Rao, who made the local community a partner in the development of the Mandal Parishad Upper Primary School (MPUPS), the nondescript village has catapulted into prominence.

Attendance is taken so seriously that if a student fails to turn up to school, his peers or teachers reach the house to find out the reason. If the student has bunked the school casually, 57-year-old Rao takes it upon himself to visit the student’s house and persuade the student to not miss classes. Often, he brings the student to the school on his bike.

To ensure students stay healthy, the school has a tie-up with the nearby Primary Health Centre, which conducts medical check-ups once in a month or two.

The school has emerged as a role model so much as that officials from other parts of Telangana have started visiting the village to understand how Rao achieved the feat.

The strategy that Srinivasa Rao adopted after his arrival in the village in 2018 is a community-school-officials-NGO alliance.

Before Rao arrived, the village hadn’t been on the radar of the administration. The villagers claim neither the collector nor officials ever paid a visit. Many teachers and principals came and went. None of them ever tried to interact with the poor and illiterate local community. Similarly, villagers, mostly dependent on forest and agriculture for livelihood, had little time to care for the school.

An invisible gulf separated the school and the village. When Rao landed in the school in 2018, he discovered to his surprise that the register had 55 names but only a handful attended classes. “The buildings with leaky roofs were in an appalling condition. One of them was uninhabitable. There was no compound wall nor were there toilets or drinking water. Students, when thirsty, had to go to a distant ‘boring’ to drink the muddy and brackish water. The pathetic condition of the government school made parents reluctant to send their children to attend classes.

When Rao began to talk to parents and started sharing his plans to transform the school, many laughed at him and told him his efforts won’t be able to change anything on the ground.

Undeterred, Rao went around the village meeting each family personally to find out the reason behind the terrible disconnect between the school and the village.

“There was no point blaming the parents for not sending children to school. The parents leave homes at the crack of dawn for work in faraway farms and return home around sunset. While a few children followed their parents, many were left in the village on their own. They spent their time roaming around the forest and ponds. The dilapidated condition of the school and apathy on part of the administration never made the parents feel that the school would be the best place for their children when they were out working,” Rao tells The Federal.

“I decided to bridge the gap by first wining the trust of the parents,” he added.

In a first step to prove he meant business, Rao got a borewell dug on the school premises. For this, Rao took the help of Bekkanti Srinivas Rao Charitable Trust, run by his own family members. Later, the Trust also provided neck ties, belts, shoes and badges to those enrolling. This helped Rao win over the hearts of the villagers, particularly the children.

To ensure the model was sustainable, Rao succeeded in weaving a partnership among the village panchayat, mandal-level officials, NGO’s such as Akella Foundation, ITC MKS, ITC Wash and Abhiyan Foundation. The officials ensured the toilets were built under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, while the panchayat came forward to provide a matching grant to ITC Bhadrachalam to take up developmental works under the Corporate Social Responsibility programme. Akella Foundation donated a huge RO plant to provide potable water to the students. Abhiyan Foundation is offering shoes to the students.

“The journey was painstaking but rewarding,” Rao says.

The first person who responded positively to Rao was the village sarpanch Katiboyina Chinna Venkateswarlu. “Rao’s relentless effort to persuade the parents to send their children to school and the generosity to spend from his own pocket for student amenities impressed the villagers. The gram panchayat decided to contribute a matching grant while villagers offered Shram Dan [free physical labour]. The work began with construction of a makeshift compound wall. In just four years, he transformed the school into a beautiful place. Now it’s a treat to watch the school and the activities there,” Venkateswarlu says.

The transformation not only encouraged those out of school to attend classes but also motivated parents like Valasa Veeraiah, who had admitted their children to distant private schools to get them in the village school.

“I first admitted my son in a private school in Laxmi Nagar, a village located 12 km away from Bandarugudem because of the condition of the local school. A van used to pick him up and this cost me a lot. Having seen the change in the school the headmaster ushered in, I my son to the local school two years back. The experience was so good that this year, I enrolled my daughter also in the village school,” Veeraiah tells The Federal.

As the story of this transformation spread, the village began to draw the attention of the top administrators.

Recalling the visit of collector Durisetty Anudeep to the village in June 2022, Venkateswarlu said it was the first-ever visit by a collector. “I never saw any officer or MLA visiting our village in my lifetime. Now, this is happening because of the school,” he added.

Kunja Nageswara Rao, chairman, school management committee, said the school with 64 students has changed the profile of the village. “For decades nobody had noticed us. Now, our village has set an example for others. The headmaster made the school the centre of village development,” he says.

“The village lost decades of precious time. Had the earlier teachers taken interest in finding the reason behind poor attendance, the school would have developed long back. They failed in their responsibility. Since Srinivasa Rao presented a vision of development, mandal officials happily became active partners. We want to showcase this as a role model and replicate it in all 26 schools in the mandal,” says Mittakola Chandramouli, Dummugudem mandal development officer. MPUPS comes under the jurisdiction of Dummugudem.

For Basavasri Umadevi, a Best Teacher awardee from the district, the school stands out as a shining example of participatory development. “Rao has been promoting the concept of community-school alliance. With a view to inspire the teachers to work beyond the call of duty, he set up Awardee Teachers Association (ATA). The ATA will work for community development. Bandarugudem is the fruit of his community-school alliance programme,” says Umadevi, who recently visited the school to see the development work at the school.

Talking on behalf of ITC WASH (Water Sanitation Hygiene Institute) project officer Rajkumar, said they had collaborated with the school in providing every amenity the institution needed. “The success of the programme lies in the fact that Rao excellently forged an alliance between the community, the school and NGOs. It is an amazing experiment that is worth replication,” Rajkumar says.

Meanwhile, children in the village no longer loiter around the forest or ponds after their parents have left for work. Instead they head to school which is not just teaching them things children need to learn but many on how to run a school.