Schoolchildren are the latest victims of the global meltdown. Unable to meet their basic requirements due to loss of business and jobs, thousands of diamond workers in Surat are pulling out their wards from schools and heading back to their villages scattered mostly across Saurashtra.Students right up to Class XII are dropping out and attendance is minimal in both municipal and private schools. “Around 1,500 school leaving certificates (SLCs) were issued to parents by municipal schools in Varachha after Diwali, besides about 2,000 SLCs by different aided and non-aided schools in the area. We are trying our best to dissuade parents, but they don’t relent,” says Mahendra Desai, president of the Varachha Students Council.The Rs 70,000-crore diamond industry is going through its worst phase from the time meltdown took effect, affecting about six lakh workers. A majority of Surat’s diamond processing units have closed shop, failing to open after the two-month layoff declared till Diwali in a last-ditch attempt to halt the fall.Varachha Area Parents’ Association president Kamlesh Chodwadia says the situation is getting from bad to worse. “Many schools have been insisting on payment of quarterly fees during the start of the second term and many jobless parents just cannot pay. In many cases, we helped parents get the SLCs when some schools refused to give even these since fees were due.”Surat’s District Education Officer K R Zanjhrukia claims schools are being persuaded to be lenient to the meltdown-stricken parents. “The parents are in a bad financial state, so we held meetings with the trustees of different schools and persuaded them to extend fee concession,” he says. Mansukh Larya, principal of M V Patel School at Varachha, says things are getting worse by the day. “We still hold classes regularly but the number of students turning up has gone down.”
