100 per cent for a Punjab village

How Shimerwala in Faridkot earned a perfect score.

No one in Shimerwala,a village thats 20 kilometres from the erstwhile princely state of Faridkot in Punjab,has ever had her thumb dabbed in ink and stamped on official papers. For,this is a village that boasts of 100 per cent literacy,a rare feat for Punjab where social differences between Jat landlords and Dalits have traditionally kept the lower castes out of school. So every villager in Shimerwala knows how to sign her namethere are no thumb impressions on pension cards or ration cards.

The village has about 190 families,an equal mix of Jats and Dalits. Eighty-four families are beneficiaries of the governments atta-dal scheme and all of them sign to claim their share.

Block samiti member Rajwinder Singh Shimerwala says,There is not a single person in this village who is deprived of educationa fact thats corroborated by the state education departments records.

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I am a Bachelor of Arts and my younger brother Shamsher Bahadur Singh is an FA,which is equivalent to class XI of present times, says Sardara Singh,88.

Sardara Singh says people in Shimerwala have always valued education,something that goes back to the days of Partition. When it was part of united India,Shimerwala was a Muslim village and after Independence,many of them left for Pakistan. Some 25 Jat families came and settled here. My family was one of them. A majority of those who came from Pakistan were highly educated. Many of us had BA,FSc,FA and other degrees.

Sardara Singh came from village Bhawalpur thats now in Pakistan. Two teachers,Gurman Singh and Manohar Singh,were among the families who settled here after Partition. So the culture of education has been with us since then, he says.

The village has an elementary school and a middle school. Children from poor families who cannot afford private education study here and then go to the high school that is a few kilometres away, says Dheerinder Kaur,the village sarpanch who holds a BA degree.

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Girls here want to earn before they marry. Eight of our girls,all of them from the lower castes,study in colleges. Prejinder Singh,a farm labourer,joined the army after completing his class XII, says the sarpanch.

Sukhdev Kaur and her family members work as farm labourers. Sukhdev,who came to the village as a bride 30 years ago,says she is illiterate but thankfully,my children and grandchildren are not.

Her granddaughter Shenazdeep is in class XI. Poor or rich,our children have to go to school. Our girls score more than the boys. The boys tend to drop out after matriculation while girls go on to do their BA,B.Ed,MA and M.Ed, she says.

Sukhdev has three granddaughters and is not worried about their marriage. My girls have made it clear that they will study till they can. So marriage can wait, she says.