At 8.10 am each day, two school buses and three vans, filled to capacity, depart from Madrasi Camp — a jhuggi-jhopdi (JJ) cluster — in Jangpura, ferrying children hailing from Tamil Nadu to the DTEA (Delhi Tamil Education Association) School at Lodhi Estate. Some students are forced to stand for the entire five-minute ride. However, they do not mind. These children attend school not just to learn standard subjects like Hindi and English, but for the comfort of learning Tamil, their mother tongue, in a place far from their home. Monish (13), a Class 7 student, is one of them. But lately, his motivation to attend school has dimmed. Like all residents of Madrasi Camp, his family has received demolition notices from the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) despite being promised in-situ housing by the BJP in the run-up to the Assembly polls. They are among 189 of 370 residents who have been allotted flats in Narela, built by the DDA in 2012, nearly 50 km away. On a school day, Kaviyasaran (17), a Humanities student at DTEA School who recently cleared his Class 11 exams, sat outside Kartik Shivam Mandir at Madrasi Camp, playing carrom. “After receiving the demolition notice, our parents stopped paying school fees for the year,” he said. “During the (Delhi) elections, we were at ease. Politicians visited often and kept reassuring us that we would not be evicted without being given proper housing in the same area. But now, it feels like our homes could be taken away any day. There is constant security deployment. and Narela is so far away.” “The first thing we checked after we were allotted flats was how we would get to school. It takes at least two hours to reach Lodhi Estate from there,” he added. Narela has smooth roads and wide streets lined with rows of buildings. Trees and shrubs mark the boundary walls of the high-rise towers. But unlike typical apartment complexes, it is eerily silent. The high-rises that await Monish’s family and many others are mostly empty. Siva, another resident of Madrasi Camp, said, “No other school will do this for our children. DTEA is the only place where our children learn Tamil — our language, our identity. There’s a small school near Narela, but it’s not close by, and the area isn’t safe. We can’t let our children travel there alone.” “We want our children to study so they don’t face the same hardships we faced all our lives,” he added. At Lodhi Estate, the intricately built white and powder-blue DTEA school — adorned with decorative stones and plants, marble statues, and filled with the sounds of chatter and laughter — may soon find its classrooms comparatively empty. Built to serve economically disadvantaged Tamil families, these schools are more than educational institutions — they are cultural anchors. The first DTEA school was established in 1924 on Mandir Marg through small voluntary contributions, set up to serve the needs of a growing population from Chennai, then Madras, in the Capital. In response to rising demand, primary schools were opened at Lodhi Estate and Karol Bagh in 1951 and 1953, respectively. By 1956, the Lodhi Estate branch had started offering higher secondary education. Today, there are seven such schools across Delhi — but not a single one lies within a 35-km radius of Narela. The Lodhi Estate school’s website lists an illustrious roster of alumni — multiple Padma Shri and Padma Bhushan awardees, UN committee members, political leaders, and film personalities. Among them are Bollywood actor and MP Hema Malini; V Krishnan, co-founder of JustDial; K Ganesh, entrepreneur and promoter of BigBasket, Portea Medical, Bluestone, HungerBox, and FreshMenu; Ramani Bharadwaj, a renowned South Indian music composer; and Usha Thorat, who served as deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of India. “For us, learning Tamil is of utmost importance. For decades, our school has stood as an anchor to aspirations of the Tamil diaspora in Delhi,” a teacher said on condition of anonymity.
