In Debarati Pal’s afterschool support classes, maths is taught with a translation sheet. Reading from it, she will ask students to divide or do percentages in five different languages because students in her class are from English-, Marathi-, Urdu-, Kannada- and Tamil-medium schools. And when they are done, the kids will check the answers in their respective languages from the translation sheets.
It may sound like an oddity but this multilingual classroom exists because Maharashtra runs schools in eight different languages, all in Mumbai. This probably makes it the most diverse school system in the country, but for children of some of the poorest migrants in the city, these schools are a lifeline without which they are in danger of falling through the school system. As well-off parents move children to private or English-medium schools, these schools have become an endangered but crucial phenomenon.
Now, while there are 44 government-run primary Tamil schools in Mumbai, there is just one government-run secondary Tamil school. And while there are 40 government primary Telugu schools, there are only two such secondary schools. This leaves students of these schools in the lurch after primary school ends in class seven. They either have to travel long distances for secondary school, change mediums, or go to a private school. All of these are difficult for these children because they have grown up and lived their lives in their mother tongue, are too poor to move to private schools and, at twelve, too young to travel long distances.
For instance, Arumugam Rajkumar is in class eight now, at Mumbai’s only government secondary Tamil school, after two gap years. His neighbourhood school had Urdu, Marathi and Tamil mediums but was only up to class seven. After that his parents decided to send him to a private Tamil school because they only speak Tamil, and he carries on English conversation mostly by nodding rather than speaking. After a year of expensive and more than an hour long commute every day, Rajkumar dropped out of school. He then spent a year at home, learning to make spikes in his hair, and making trouble with older boys. Now, he has got readmitted to school where he learns Tamil but studies most other subjects in English and copes with the help of afterschool classes.
“Children should be able to complete school where they started,” says R Govinda, vice chancellor of the National University of Education Policy and Administration, and director of the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT). “State governments need to combine schools so that a child who is admitted in class one leaves only in class 12. Otherwise children have to run around for admissions to secondary school and sometimes end up dropping out.” These schools are supported by policy but practical difficulties mean few states other than Maharashtra have as diverse a school system. The Right to Education Act makes primary education a fundamental right, and says “medium of instruction shall, as far as practicable, be in the child’s mother tongue.” It also instructs schools to “ensure admission to children of migrant families.”
But the logistical nightmare of appointing teachers, textbook setters, examiners and premises in eight languages has made it difficult to keep these schools going. A municipal school premises in Colaba houses eight schools across six languages. Administrators manage them all by holding two shifts and three classes in what was once an auditorium. Until recently, there was also a Gujarati-medium school and classes were sometimes held in corridors.
While Ujwala Patil, chairperson of the Maharashtra State Board of Secondary and Higher Secondary Education (MSBSHSE) did not wish to comment, one of her predecessors agrees that managing these schools was one of the hardest things she had to do. One of the ways the board manages is by keeping textbooks, including the numbers in maths questions and order of questions, the same across languages.
Karnataka, on the other hand, runs schools in several languages at the primary level but at the secondary level it runs mostly Kannada and Urdu schools. Meera Samson, a researcher at educational research organisation Collaborative Research and Dissemination (CORD), says, “We saw only little evidence of reading material in any language except the state language,” in research done in Koraput, Vizag, Sahibganj and Katihar.
While it is unusual and difficult to run these schools, they celebrate the city’s diversity. Two years ago, more than a dozen children from Arumugam Rajkumar’s community in Wadi Bunder moved back to Tamil Nadu to complete their education. Since then, Bina Lashkari, executive director of afterschool support programme Doorstep schools, and member of the State Commission for Protection of Child Rights, has run support groups to help these children fit in to Mumbai schools. “These are some of the most vulnerable children and it is important to retain them in schools,” she says.
Nikita Turval, who attends Debarati Pal’s class, walks more than a kilometre to get home after school every night. She was in a Kannada school till class seven, after which the closest such secondary school ran only from 6-9pm. But she is happy to have the option of staying in a Kannada school and has chosen it because, she says, her grandfather told her that “if everyone goes to an English school, who will go to a Kannada school?”
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