Challenge of Red River
Lee Iacocca, one of America’s business leaders said, “Humans have brains — at least most of us do — and that means we can act based on reason, hope and possibility.” Lee poses three fundamental questions for anyone launching into something innovative but he did so based on what was America’s great need at the time — the mousetrap. He asks: (a)Will the initiative build a better mousetrap? (b)Will it ultimately create jobs? (c) Will it stand the test of time?
These words are a vivid memory jogger of what is an innovation, not so much in promoting best business practices but in reaching out to over two million people inhabiting the chars and chaporis of Assam through the “Ship of Hope,” better known as AKHA — a rare intervention in healthcare which provide basic health facilities to the unreached and unserved population of the river islands.
This initiative by the Centre for North East Studies and Policy Research (C-NES) was first launched in 2005 in Dibrugarh district. The boat, equipped with medical health officers, health counsellors, stocks of vaccines, medicines, oral rehydration salts and other health-related supplies navigated the Brahmaputra to reach out to children and women with critical heathcare support. C-NES’s partner in this novel, heart-warming experimental outreach is Unicef. This partnership in healthcare has now bloomed into a collaborative effort to also provide basic education to the children of the chars andchaporis.
What triggered the education programme was an incident where C-NES members saw schoolchildren crossing a fast flowing stream in a country boat. The boat capsized and although the children were rescued, their parents were traumatised. What if a similar incident recurred? Such accidents actually make parents wonder if it is worth taking the risk and putting their kids in jeopardy only to “get education”.
For C-NES and Unicef, the not-so-happy incident turned into angst to provide education to the children of the river islands closer to their homes.
They set up what are called “feeder schools” which are a sort of bridge to upper primary schooling.
Making use of available social capital, the two NGOs mobilised the villagers to set up a school in July 2007 with an enrolment of 73 students. The school building was constructed with community contributions and two local youths, one with a Higher Secondary certificate and another who has passed High School, were appointed teachers. The communities agreed to a monthly fee of Rs 30 per student to pay the teachers’ salaries and other expenses. But there were other expenses that parents had to incur such as school books. In a situation where poverty is as real as the air we breathe and getting two square meals more important than reading and writing, the school idea was destined to fail. It just was not sustainable.
At this critical juncture, C-NES and Unicef-Assam teamed up to start schools that would not be too taxing on the parents’ pockets. This venture started in 2009. The education facilities extended to the chaporis in Dibrugarh district were replicated in 15 chaporis of Lakhimpur and later expanded to five more. But this is not to say that things were hunky-dory. There is only so much that NGOs can do with their limited resources.
The schools functioned tentatively with inadequate monitoring and supervision; lack of qualified and trained teachers and of course the basic infrastructure. This is where the government’s Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) programme came as a life jacket for the schools.
The SSA provided teachers and this helped improve the pupil:teacher ratio. In a sense this is a good model for public-private partnership (PPP) in a very critical area of governance. In fact C-NES’s health intervention also got a shot in the arm with cutting edge support from the government’s National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) scheme.
Somebody rightly remarked that it is impossible for strangers to Assam’s perennial floods to understand how tough life is for those living on the fringes of development and at the mercy of the river. The Brahmaputra, which rightly carries the prefix “mighty”, spans over 891km from Sadiya to Dhubri.
Along its highly flexible course there are 2,251 river islands which cover a total area of 3,608 square km (4.6 per cent of the total area of Assam) and are home to 24.9 lakh population.
This works out to 9.3per cent of Assam’s total population of 2.7 crore. The literacy rate in these river islands is a mere 19.31 per cent which is not surprising considering they are totally out of the development map charted out by policy makers in the state. In this case seldom seen is not necessarily much admired. In governance parlance, unless you make a loud noise and are visible on the TV frame, you are out of the mind-space of the movers and shakers in the government.
However, it would be wrong to blame government officials or politicians for what is entirely a natural phenomenon beyond their control.
If at all we can blame them for not having has a vision to come up with a workable model of healthcare and education in all these years, no matter how adversarial the circumstances.
L. Changsan, Assam’s education commissioner, shared her anxiety at a stakeholder’s meeting jointly organised by Unicef and C-NES at Guwahati on September 24 last.
Stating that she had seen the huge challenges on the river island of Majuli where floodwaters come from all directions and the course of the river changes almost every year, every intervention is of a temporary nature. Hence, even school structures are made of collapsible material because where a school stands today could be submerged under water with the onrush of a flood.
Changsan said the biggest challenge to education, therefore, is when children are out of school for two or three months because their school is under water.
The bombastic rhetoric of “joyful learning” which is spouted by the mandarins in the ministry of human resource development does not take into account the specifics of some of our remote outposts.
For children of the river island going to school is swimming against the tide each day. Such rhetoric only sounds good in the public school precincts catering to the affluent.
Sadly, the education policies outlined by this country do not take into account the special challenges thrown up by the river islands of Assam. But this is where the role of policy makers comes in.
Do they not have enough clout in Delhi to make out a case that Assam needs a different model of SSA or NHRM considering the peculiarities of the terrain and the overwhelmingly disastrous floods that reduce all good and innovative efforts to naught?
Indeed, one question that has been raised repeatedly at different forum is why plans and policies crafted by some economic wizard who has never visited the Northeast, more specifically the river islands of Assam, be imposed on the northeastern region despite being patently unsuitable.
The government is already in haste about implementing the Right to Education (RTE) which seeks to bring all children of this country within the ambit of some school programme.
As Sanjoy Hazarika, managing trustee of C-NES, says, the challenge here is to first provide access to so many children when schools are located so far away from their homes and journeying to and fro is fraught with uncertainties.
This is a challenge that the government of Assam should engage with more seriously. C-NES and Unicef have shown that some things are doable.
Governments need to partner more effectively with such organisations.
by PATRICIA MUKHIM on The Telegraph
(The writer can be contacted at patricia17@rediffmail.com)