WHEN extremists gunned down Nagen Kalita, a poor farmer of Barimajha village in Kamrup district, the hopes of his nine-year-old son Manoj died with him. Three years later, he is learning to dream again, thanks to Project Aashwas, which gives him a monthly stipend of Rs 600 to go back to school.‘‘I never thought I would be able to come back to school,’’ says Manoj today. ‘‘For three years I watched my classmates race ahead of me. Now I want to catch up with them.’’Twelve-year-old Manoj is not a stray case. Altogether, 166 children, all innocent victims of insurgency, have resumed their studies under the aegis of Project Aashwas, an Assam Police initiative launched last November. ‘‘We set up the basic project with Unicef. Now we are looking to covering more children and compiling a list of children who have lost their fathers or both their parents to the decade-long insurgency,’’ says Bhaskar Jyoti Mahanta, IPS and nodal officer of Project Aashwas.The scholarship funds for the children come from the National Foundation for Communal Harmony.The 166 children covered by the first phase of the project include 32 from Kokrajhar, one of the districts worst affected by insurgency, and 30 from Kamrup. ‘‘Many of these children topped their classes, but dropped out of school after losing a parent, usually a father,’’ says Mahanta. ‘‘Also, we have selected only children belonging to families below the poverty line.’’While children are widely regarded as the worst affected section of a population caught up in prolonged strife, the Assam figures are truly staggering. For instance, a Unicef study puts the total number of children made homeless by a major clash between Bodos and Adivasis in Kokrajhar and Bongaigaon in May-June 1996 at 74,103. Of these, 1,257 lost one parent or both, 426 were abandoned, while hundreds suffered physical injuries, hunger and ill-health in the years that followed in temporary relief camps. Education was a forgotten chapter.Apart from deaths in ethnic riots, government records say that at least 2,200 civilians were killed by various armed outfits over the past decade, while 1,173 militants lost their lives to security forces. The toll of security personnel stands at 1,679.‘‘The years of violence have caused immense trauma to children. The time had come for the police force to make a compassionate gesture towards them. So, we are sensitising policemen on the need for better handling of children,’’ says Harekrishna Deka, director-general, Assam Police.To ensure the initiatives have the desired impact, each block has a monitoring body comprising the BDO, a local headmaster and a local panchayat president. ‘‘We will also seek quarterly reports from the school headmaster about the child’s performance,’’ says Mahanta.To take the project closer to the masses, Mahanta and his deputy Debajit Hazarika have roped in personalities like music whiz Bhupen Hazarika, film stars Nipon Goswami and Pranjal Saikia to take part in the various programmes. Last week, the Aashwas project officials launched another programme, this time in league with the National Institute of Public Cooperation and Child Development, to train policemen to become more community-oriented and child-friendly. Mahanta says they are looking at training 600 sub-inspectors in the next 12 months ‘‘because they are the cutting edge, the mainstay of the police force’’.
