Flicker in Dantewada

Dantewadas bullet-riddled,violence-framed narrative is tragically familiar: the border town of Chhattisgarh that is caught in a long-drawn-out crossfire between Naxals and security forces,its people wracked by deprivation and illiteracy and pushed further into the margins. Turning that story around isnt easy for the state not exactly the most popular there but someone is trying to make a difference.

District Collector O.P. Chaudhary has placed the education of Dantewadas tribal children at the heart of an innovative programme. Away from the convulsions of the adult world,he has made children the new stakeholders of change. Students are trained for medical and engineering entrance exams over a hundred of them are bussed from remote tribal villages and given free boarding and coaching. It has been a little less than a year since Chaudhary took over,but his initiatives,especially a Rs 100-crore Education City which would have an engineering college,a girls school and a residential school for children orphaned in the Naxal violence,show what a determined bureaucracy and solid political will can effect. A childs right to education gets fulfilled to some measure here. The district has also got its first air-conditioned cinema and government vehicles ferry kids daily for a movie outing. Another barrier is psychological the prejudices and fears about the administration,the archenemy that has been held up by the extremists to carry on their war. The solution seems almost simplistic: tours of the collectorate and trips to industrial townships like Bhilai. But in that outreach by the administration,children glimpse a larger world and its immense possibilities.

The argument that is often put forth to support the anarchic agenda of the Naxals is that it stems out of intense deprivation. Its abject fallacy can be contested,what cannot be is that education and an administration with its heart in the right place could help find a way out.