Inspiration
Teacher Warriors 2022: The story of Kaliyuva Mane, ‘home for learning’
This is the story of Ananth Kumar, an engineer who decided to dedicate his life to researching and developing an alternate model of education for rural opportunity-deprived children.
On the evening of August 1992, a man walked into the city of Mysore. He was stationed in a tiny village called Srirampura and rented a compact sheet-roofed house for himself. He observed that there were many children in his neighbourhood. One Sunday, he decided to host outdoor games for them. The children flocked around the house, slowly getting acquainted with him. As they were playing, one of them called out for the man and said “brother!”. Soon, he was known as the brother who hosted games on Sundays.
One day, three students from grade 10 approached Brother with quadratic equations. While helping them, he realised that the students were unaware of the basics of numbers and equations; they had not come across the term square root or square while studying Math. Thankfully, the three students cleared the board exams with his help. This increased the demand for his supplementary classes and one morning, he found sixty students waiting at 6’o clock outside his house.
This is the story of Ananth Kumar, an engineer who decided to dedicate his life to researching and developing an alternate model of education for rural opportunity-deprived children. He built Kaliyuva Mane which means ‘home for learning’ and this home was open to students of all ages and grades with no fixed period of admission or tedious procedures. The school is fuelled by the vision of transforming children into self-sufficient citizens by sharing love, empathy, and quality education.
Challenges along the way
According to a report by the Ministry of Human Resources Development, literacy in rural areas was 64.7 percent, as opposed to 79.5 percent in urban areas. This went further down when the country went into lockdown. In a survey tabled in the Parliament, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman highlighted the ASER (rural) reports. During the pandemic, children between the age of 6 to 14 years who were ‘not currently enrolled in schools’ increased from 2.5 percent in 2018 to 4.6 percent in 2021.
The COVID-19 induced lockdown is remembered differently by each one of us. Ananth Kumar remembers it having a more positive impact than negative. “Our school was converted into a complete residential school and the staff members stayed on campus with the children. This helped in keeping all our focus on the children and I feel that we have come out stronger as a team,” he said. “The only negative impact in my opinion is that our operating cost has hiked due to the escalation in the price of commodities,” he added.
While a lot of schools shut down, Kaliyuva Mane was not only taking care of the education but, also the health and well-being of the students and staff. The teachers motivated each other as they would in a family. The students stayed on campus and any new member of the school was first observed for two weeks in quarantine before being granted permission to enter the school. Both teaching and non-teaching staff stayed on campus and the children spent most of their time in open areas. The three-acre campus hosted open-space classes and for the first time, the gates of Kaliyuva Mane were shut to outsiders. The rule was simple – sanitise, thermal scan, and wait in the visitor’s lounge before the school any interaction was allowed. Any material bought from the stores was put in isolation for at least 12 hours. The students performed yoga asanas in the morning and pranayama in the evening to maintain a healthy regime. They were provided with vitamin tablets and protein powder to maintain strong immunity. Everyone would come together for a prayer for the pandemic to end before going to bed. Call it God’s grace or thorough care, not a single child came in contact with the deadly disease.
An innovative method of teaching
The school follows an interesting method of teaching. “Kaliyuva Mane is neither a conventional English medium school nor a Kannada medium school. Most of the children come from rural, uneducated houses, where English is an alien language. Therefore, when a child joins Kaliyuva Mane, lessons are taught only in their native language, Kannada. Gradually, English is introduced to the child according to their understanding and comfort level. Core subjects are taught in both languages to the children. For instance, in a science class, the teacher teaches the English component of the lesson first. The focus is on teaching spelling, meaning, pronunciation, and usage of new and difficult words to the children before teaching the science component. Later, children appear for grade 10 board exam in English medium,” he said. “We follow this because if core subjects are taught only in English, children may fail to comprehend. However, if English is not taught, children will miss out on an important life skill. Without basic English, chances of getting into science and technical courses are very bleak. So, we try to strike a balance in order to optimise the learning process,” he added.
Views on NEP 2020
The new National Education Policy, 2020 (NEP) has divided people into the category of supporters and critics. Ananth Kumar shared his suggestion with the Union Government that invited stakeholders to contribute to the policy during ‘The Draft of NEP’. He highlighted the need of creating alternative schools to educate out-of-school children and other opportunity-deprived children by illustrating live examples. This was included in the final National Education Policy of 2020 that encourages the setting up of alternative schools. The extract reads:
“To make it easier for both governments as well as non-governmental philanthropic organizations to build schools, to encourage local variations on account of culture, geography, and demographics, and to allow alternative models of education, the requirements for schools will be made less restrictive. The focus will be to have less emphasis on input and greater emphasis on output potential concerning desired learning outcomes….” Para 3.6 of NEP 2020
Pat on the back
Ananth Kumar looks back at the journey rather fondly. In 2005, when the school came into existence, it was built on two acres of land in the village, fifteen kilometres away from the heart of the city. The connecting roads were full of potholes and the transformer powering the school was two kilometres away that supplied 120 volts instead of 240 volts for 8 hours a day.
They would refill the water in school at midnight because the voltage used to be reasonably good during the night. The only building on the land around the school was a 50’x30’ size dilapidated structure, that was inhabited by owls, beautiful birds, snakes, mosquitoes, bandicoots, bats and six human beings (four children and two life-term volunteers of Divyadeepa trust). The land looked green full of mulberry bushes, coconut trees, silver oak trees, teak trees, and parthenium shrubs. The rest was covered in a carpet of ‘touch me not’ plants.
When thinking about his achievements, he notes a few. “We were able to create a new learning alternative education system for out-of-system children like child labourers, school dropouts, children with academic lag, children from broken families, children from rural BPL families, dyslexic children, etc. The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) produced a documentary film on our school model,” he said. “And, in the year 2011, when the automobile giant Mahindra & Mahindra launched the ‘Spark the Rise’ contest, inviting ideas from the Indians for the development of India, our project, ‘Education of Rural out of system Children’, emerged as runners up in the grand finale among 1346 projects which were featured and won a grant of ₹20 lakhs,” he added.
“The land used to reverberate with the sounds of nightingales, chirping of birds, stridulations of the insects, and swaying songs of the trees. Nobody had stayed there for three years! Whether it was to run errands or go to a doctor in an emergency, there was no vehicle except an old Kinetic Honda scooter. Divyadeepa’s bank balance was ₹5334/- Until the end of 2007, they would manage the finances through personal funds. There was not even a single computer, the internet was just a dream. The team prepared and dedicated one room of the building for the children’s stay. No sleeping cots, no beds; children slept on mats. “There was no hot water, no proper infrastructure, too many ‘no’s’. A ‘yes’ that played a big role in maintaining our faith in the school was God. We took a step forward helped us to keep going,” he added.
Call for action
Rural education can be a huge challenge and Kaliyuva Mane sends a message of strength to all the educators following this path. The vision and dream for the students are that each of them must get a chance to get educated so that they become self-reliant. “Study well, develop a good attitude, stand on your own feet and contribute to the development of the society, find happiness in it,” said Ananth Kumar in a message for his students.
“As I conclude this interview, my mind goes back 30 years when I was living a very different life. Lakshmi Didi, the president of Vivekananda Kendra, Kanyakumari used to take classes for us on Vivekananda, in the yoga hall, every day at 8.30 morning. Her words still linger in my heart, “If a problem haunts you and makes you restless then feel, feel and feel till your heart bleeds, think, think and think till your brain reels. Find out a solution. Don’t wait for money and men. Put your hands on the wheels of work. Money WILL come, Men WILL come & God’s Grace WILL come”. This is a well-known quote by Swami Vivekananda. For me, this is not a mere quote from Vivekananda, but a truth directly experienced by me,” he said.
Ananth Kumar seeks dedicated volunteers for Kaliyuva Mane. They accept donations in both, cash and kind. We urge the readers to visit their website and reach out to the members to contribute and engage in this cause for change.