This Maharashtra teacher solved school dropout problem and won a UN prize

On his first day at school in a small village in Solapur district of Maharashtra, Ranjitsinh Disale was shocked to see only 5-6 students against a capacity of around 60.

It was his first day back in 2011 as a teacher at the Zila Parishad School, Kadamvasti, Paratewadi in Madha taluka of Solapur district. And there were no girls too in this primary school for classes 1 to 4.

Disale, 32, on December 3, 2020, was conferred with the Global Teacher Prize of $1 Million by the Varkey Foundation and UNESCO for his innovative teaching. One of his achievements was the innovative use of technology to reduce student dropout and increase the enrolment of students in classrooms.

He would share 50% of the prize money with the remaining nine teachers from the 10 Global Teacher Prize finalists.

Dealing with school dropouts

Disale, a resident of Barshi in Solapur district, wanted to be an engineer and had enrolled for the same. However, he dropped out due to constant ragging by his seniors. Later, he enrolled for Diploma in Education, training to become teacher, at Vadala, Solapur and joined the Paratewadi school.

And that is when he was shocked to see the low turnout of students. After interacting with fellow teachers and locals, he realised that parents didn’t consider sending their children to school important. Parents feel the children can be used in work at home or farms and contribute to the family income.

Disale then got a laptop and started showing movies to the kids at school. He says children generally feel that the purpose of going to school is to have fun. Showing movies proved successful as kids started to attend school and there was a growth in numbers slowly. He wanted to change the concept to edutainment.

Disale knew that any talk pressuring parents to send their wards to school would be futile and he needed to have a different strategy like a ‘community engagement programme’.

“I began to attend village functions like wedding ceremonies where I could interact with a bunch of parents at one go. I would ask them if they were comfortable doing farming and whether they wanted their kids to face the same hardships like they do by continuing farming without education or any technical knowledge? Slowly they started to realise that they should send kids to school,” Disale tells.

The language limbo

Soon, he learnt about a new problem that kids faced — they didn’t understand Marathi, the language of instruction at the school.

“Child marriages are rampant in the area. Locals marry their children in Karnataka which is 60-80 km away (from the place). Young girls deliver babies who learn to speak Kannada. The young couples, unable to take care of their kids, send them to their parents back in Madha. The kids understand only Kannada and not Marathi, language of instruction at the primary school.”

India has over 19,500 languages and dialects, but not more than 800 are used as a medium of instruction in schools, as per a government study. This is said to cause dropouts of over 50%. 32.2 million kids (6-17) are out of school due to various reasons, as per government data.

Disale, with the help of fellow teachers, then tried to find out videos online relevant to every chapter in books in Marathi or Kannada. When he could not find them online, he recorded videos at the school and would give these in memory cards to parents.

But only a few parents had smartphones then. His next challenge was to convince parents to buy smartphones but it turned out to be an easy task.

“By that time, 2014-15, smartphones had become common and were available for ₹4,000-5,000. Kids having smartphones would share their experiences with other kids who in turn would ask their parents to buy phones. Initially, seven parents had phones and by the end of the year, 32 out of 70 parents had smartphones,” says Disale.

Transferring data via memory cards proved to be difficult and Disale came to know about Quick Response (QR) codes. He would stick QR codes in chapters so that kids can study whenever they want at home.

He proposed the idea of embedding QR codes to the Maharashtra government which implemented it across the state in 2016. The government of India adopted the idea in all its primary school books in 2018.

The project came in handy during the pandemic as schools had to remain closed and kids were taught online.

Journey to Global Teacher Prize

Disale is the only teacher in India whose Hit Refreshing story was published by Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft for QR code enabled teaching.

It was during a meeting of 100 teachers mentioned in the book, at Toronto, he befriended teachers worldwide. He applied for the Global Teachers Prize in 2018 after one of the teachers suggested but he could not make it to the final 50. However, he won it last year.

Disale credits his success to his father who is a teacher himself, saying that he knew that without parents’ participation, the children would not be able to study well.

He would send text or WhatsApp messages to the parents on what their children had to study on that day.

“We put a loudspeaker at the school and the school would give instructions at 7 pm every day for parents that it is the study time (for children).  This 7-8 pm period was called ‘Change of Hour’,” tells Kadam Guruji, the only fellow teacher of Disale in the school.

Peace Army for conflict solution

Disale in 2018 started the campaign ‘Let’s cross the border’ to create peace army of students from eight conflict-hit countries — India-Pakistan, Israel-Palestine, USA-North Korea and Iraq-Iran.

“We want to create a peace army of 50,000 students from eight countries by 2030. Till now, an 18,000-student army is ready,” he says.

Disale will spend the prize money for this project.

He has created a six weeks’ training module. Over 150 schools from these eight countries will select students. Students from rival countries are connected in the first week. In the following week, two students, one from rival countries, become buddies and discuss why their countries are fighting each other. They discuss the differences and similarities in the fourth week, and possible solutions to problems in the fifth week, and finally, they discuss what next in the last week.

His students are more than happy with the use of technology. Prathmesh Kadam, a class 4 student, says, “I have been to Australia, many forts in India through virtual trips that Disale sir has initiated. I have also interacted with my friends in Pakistan and discussed how war is futile.”

Reducing girls’ dropout

Disale was also able to stop the dropout rate of girl students by consistent interaction with their parents.

The parents would not allow girls to go school as they felt that girls can work at home and can be married off early. As per one research, 57% of girls drop out of schools by the age of 17.

“Disale sir has done important work of making all of parents in the village understand why kids should attend school. Parents would feel kids can contribute to work at home and that is enough as they would anyway do farming after growing up. But Disale sir changed this,” says Bhau Kadam, one of the parents whose son studies in class 4.