In Ahmedabad, modified city buses offer impoverished children a road to learning

Climbing up the stairs on a cue from the teacher, children aged 6-10 years quickly take their positions in rows. After greeting the teacher, they mimic their teacher and fold their hands reciting after her a Gujarati prayer. Soon their attention is grasped by the rhymes being played on the tv screen in front of them.

The Signal Scheme was launched on Sunday morning outside the Gujarat High Court Auditorium. In attendance were Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel, Education Minister Jitu Vaghani, Minister of Law and Justice Rajendra Trivedi along with Supreme Court judges Justice M R Shah and Justice Bela Trivedi, Gujarat High Court Chief Justice Aravind Kumar and Justice R M Chhaya, who is also executive chairman GSLSA. Ten buses took off on designated routes picking up children from the traffic signals, taking them through the first classroom in the bus, the route ending at the nearest municipal school.

With the motto ‘bhiksha nahi, shiksha’, the scheme has started with 10 discarded Ahmedabad Municipal Transport Service (AMTS) buses especially converted into a mobile school for the purpose. The AMC had announced the Signal School scheme — for children at traffic signals across the city — with a sanctioned budget of Rs 3 crore.

Parents of nearly 150 children from over 40 bigger traffic signals in the city were seen eagerly waiting to see their children board the bus for the first time.

While Sonal chooses to remain quiet, Jigar says, ‘I want to be a good man’ when asked why he wants to study and what he aspires to become. Originally residents of Petlad in the Anand district, the siblings lost their father a few years ago. As seasonal migrants, now they live in shanties along the road near the Doordarshan Tower intersection. Their mother does daily wage work to support the family of five.

Most of the 20 children on the Signal School on this route had not attended any formal school before. Ahmedabad municipal commissioner Lochan Sehra that this scheme has been designed keeping this fact in mind.

“After conducting a survey to identify such children, a series of meetings followed with their parents to convince them. Now this being a gap-filling scheme after a period of six months or a year based on their learning levels, these children will be mainstreamed to the nearby municipal schools. This will be followed by another set of children who are out of the formal education system,” says Sehra.

Each Signal School has one teacher and one assistant teacher and is decked up with colourful drawings with messages of good habits on its walls. The ceilings have been converted into an open sky painted with a rainbow. Basic lessons like alphabets, numbers, fruits and vegetables are painted in vibrant colours below the windows. These buses are also equipped with a tv screen, a writing board, a small desk and chair for the teacher, and toys and games for children.

Run as a normal school, children in the Signal School will be provided mid-day meals at the nearest municipal school. They would also be covered under the state government’s scheme of medical check-ups offered to municipal schools under the school health programme (SHP). In the case of Sonal and Jigar, for instance, the school route ended up at the Prathmik Shala in Vastrapur, informs Vipul Chaudhary, the assistant administrative officer attached to this particular Signal School.

In the initial days, to engender confidence, parents, too, are allowed onboard.

Admitting the challenge of convincing parents to continue sending their children, Sehra said, “For this, we have covered the families of these children too. To uplift them, they will be given benefits of all government schemes and try to make them leave begging. They are the ones out of the social security net. So if we do not focus on parents they will not send their children to school.”

“I want my children to study but we keep migrating from one place to another. But if such a school is available in other parts of the city as well I will continue sending them to these,” said Mintudevi Vaghari, who was waiting outside the bus for her two children aged 6 and 7.

Depending on the demand, the scheme will be replicated with more buses, says the Municipal School Board Administrative Officer L D Desai. The School Board Chairman Dr Sujoy Mehta added that “instead of appointing regular senior teachers, 20 young dynamic teachers have been recruited on a contractual basis for these buses”.