Message in the medium

Ghosia is a small market town on the Allahabad-Varanasi stretch of the Grand Trunk Road and is in the heart of the famous carpet industry spread across the districts of Mirzapur and Bhadohi. Here too the old GT road is being transformed into the tarmac-smooth GQ, and road rollers and levelers are busy at work.

In the midst of all the construction and traffic, we spot toddlers in bright uniforms huddled in caged rickshaws leaving school at noon. Across the road, a residential bungalow sports the billboard8212;8216;J.K. Lion8217;s School.8217;

No, the school isn8217;t some Kashmiri entrepreneur8217;s tribute to Sheikh Abdullah.

It is Partition refugee S.S. Chhabra8217;s dream-come-true. Chhabra, a Sikh businessman who started life in a Delhi refugee camp in 1947, owns a transport business in Bhadohi. He always wanted to start a school and opened this one in 2000 with just eight children in lower KG. The initials JK stand for his wife Jaswant Kaur and Lion8217;s because he belongs to that organisation.

Each year, a class has been added and now it has around a hundred students in all in LKG, UKG, Class I and II. Chhabra has no time to discuss elections; he is too busy with the start of a new school year and fresh admissions.

An affable Sardarji, Chhabra shows us neatly packed sets of glossy textbooks 8212;8216;8216;CBSE-syllabus8217;8217;8212;for each class and the list is impressive. The upper KG set, for instance, has 10 books including Know Your Arithmetic, Learn Your Tables, Let8217;s Read English, Nursery Rhymes and that staple of cursive-obsessed convent schools8212;Running Writing. The set costs Rs 256.

The fees are steep too 8212; Rs 150 per month for KG students, Rs 175 for Class I, and Rs 200 for Class II. 8216;8216;In Class III, we will introduce computers, so naturally the fees will increase,8217;8217; he says candidly, adding that though parents crib as they do in Delhi or Mumbai, there is no serious misgiving about the scale of fees.

The school has seven teachers and Chhabra is inordinately proud of his 8216;8216;English8217;8217; teacher Rajni Kumari because she is not a 8216;8216;local8217;8217; like the others and especially hired to imbue quality in an English-medium school.

Rajni Kumari doesn8217;t exactly speak the Queen8217;s English but clearly enjoys the job though it is so far away from her home in Patanamtittha district in Kerala. What is a girl from Kerala doing in this way out place? Rajni tells us that a whole lot of Malayalis, in their perennial search for jobs, are teaching in the new schools that dot the Mirzapur-Bhadohi belt.

And Chhabra, with touching innocence, explains why 8216;8216;south Indians8217;8217; are so popular in these parts. 8216;8216;You see, just like Hindi is our mother tongue, English is their mother tongue. So when I decided to start this school, I hired Rajni who was teaching in St John8217;s school in nearby Auria.8217;8217;

While the Auria school has been functioning for several years, a number of non-missionary private schools have come up in kasbas dotting the GQ in the last couple of years alone. In Ghosia itself, a carpet exporter opened the 8216;Thunder Heart8217; school in 2003.

One reason for the mushrooming of such schools is a growing semi-rural and rural middle class, thanks to the carpet industry. But that industry8217;s heydays are over. Besides, the J.K. Lion8217;s school draws kids from many agricultural families living in the adjoining villages of Bhawanipur, Jethupur, Rajapr, and Jairampur.

But the more important reason, Ram Sringar Bind of Medinipur village tells us, is the dismal quality of government schools. 8216;8216;The students go regularly but teachers seldom come on time, and then they just lie on the charpai and get their feet massaged,8217;8217; he says. Since no one is failed till Class 8, the students are 8216;8216;educated8217;8217; on the surface but 8216;8216;hollow8217;8217; within. 8216;8216;Private school mein to padhai hoti hai, mehanat hoti hi. Is liye bacche ja rahen hain,8217;8217; says 19-year-old Binda, ruing that there was no JK Lion8217;s School when he was growing up.