With the help of Durga Gudilu, an activist from the community who has taken up the initiative, a total of 412 children — 284 girls and 128 boys — will soon start school
Crushing an age old practice of not allowing girls to venture out of their homes to attend school, in a record victory, a total of 284 girl students from the Vaidu community across Mumbai will now be attending school from the following academic year.
With the help of Durga Gudilu, an activist from the community who has taken up the initiative, a total of 412 children — 284 girls and 128 boys — will soon start school. Gudilu's initiative began last year, when a group of young Vaidu men and women, as a part of the Maharashtra Vaidu Swayamsangharsha Samajik Sanstha, conducted a survey to find out the number of students attending schools from various ghettos of the community in the city.
In the second leg of the survey this year, the group found that 412 children have never gone to school or quit school due to various reasons. "This year, we focussed on the underlying reasons of the alarming dropout rate. In most cases, we found that a large number of parents did not wish to send their children especially daughters to school as they would lose out on an extra working hand to earn money," she added.
The survey was conducted across 11 major ghettos of the community — Kalyan, Vitthalwadi, Kalwa, Thane, Kurla, Mankhurd, Jogeshwari, Goregaon, Borivli, Vikhroli and Dahisar.
A large number of children quit schools as their parents could not afford fees for private schools and did not trust government run schools. "We decided to get donors for these children. The condition was that the donor would take care of not only the finances incurred but would also follow up on the educational growth of the child till he/she completes school," Gudilu added. After their appeal, several NGOs and individual donors have come forward to help these children with their educational expenses.
Gudilu and her team now plan to expand the drive to other tribal communities in the city. "We are conducting another set of survey for the wadhwals and several such tribes and hope to enrol their children in schools too," she added.
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