C. Muralimohan—Sadhana Educational Resource Centre, Andhra Pradesh, India
C.Muralimohan is addressing the challenge of educating the children of rural migrant workers. Through innovative interventions and mechanisms geared to retain these children in schools while their parents are away, Muralimohan is giving shape to an entirely new community structure which has direct impact on the region and truly all of India.
Beginning his work among the Lambada tribe, the largest tribal group in the neglected multistate border areas of the South Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, Muralimohan is creating unique support systems to enable children of migrant workers to continue with their education.
A tribal gypsy community which traces its roots back to the Roma of Eastern Europe, the Lambada, about 40 lakh in population, comprises the largest tribal group in Andhra Pradesh. The state is home to the second-largest scheduled tribe population in southern India and has the seventh largest tribal population in the country. Their region’s propensity for drought forces the Lambada tribespeople to migrate seasonally for work. For a period of about six months every year, they travel to the neighboring states of Karnataka and Maharashtra and engage in agricultural labor. The children often begin but cannot complete school due to problems keeping up attendance. Andhra Pradesh is also the worst affected by naxalism with about 18 naxal groups active in 12 of the state’s 23 districts. They follow various ideological lines of Left extremism. The People's War Group, skilled in guerilla and jungle warfare, is the most feared force. While local administrations run a few soft programmes among the tribals and multistate border populations to contain the menace, the states sharing borders prefer to pass the buck around, disowning immediate responsibility. Those caught in the middle are the poor tribal youth, whose frustrations lead them into these extremist folds.
Muralimohan realizes that seasonal migration is inevitable and he cannot stop it. He is therefore providing acceptable alternatives to the problems of schooling by introducing innovative methods like mobile schools for very young children who must accompany their parents to job sites and residential bridge schools for those who have lagged behind in the curriculum and need to come up to the required standard in order to join the mainstream. He has 3 parts to his program: mobile schools that move with children, residential camps that help children re-attain their grade level, and homestay programs that let children stay behind in their communities to continue school. In the past two years, he has admitted 6,500 children to mainstream schools and is currently preparing another batch of 3,200. In 2006, the first Lambada girl to ever reach this point in school will take the graduation examination.
For Muralimohan, education is a fundamental building block of development. His long-term vision is for these children to reap the benefits of education by using it to find solutions to the issues of loss of traditional livelihoods, poverty and socio-political exclusion affecting such tribal communities.Therefore Muralimohan is also instilling a sense of identity and inclusion on the community level through the Tribal Development Forum, which encourages participation in governance at the village level (the panchayat system) by mobilizing youth groups and community elders to act as initiators and guardians of the democratic process. The latter is intended to connect them to the larger democratic canvas, particularly with regard to basic rights and allocation of resources.
Muralimohan is currently working in 100 Lambada villages in the Medak district of Andhra Pradesh. Last year, his organization Sadhana registered a success of 100% enrollment in various schools in the district. More important, Muralimohan’s model is also applicable to other seasonal migratory populations spread out over the rest of India. Murali’s future plans are focused on expanding his school program, retaining the current crop of 11,500 children in their schools, and strengthening the second generation leadership and the state network. His vision extends to bringing together several thandas so that they can negotiate for their own Panchayat. Thus he is also preparing to share his experiences in all he multistate border areas from Kashmir in the north to Orissa and West Bengal in the east and Rajasthan and Chattisgarh in the west and mid-west. His methods and strategies, primarily the youth forums, are being replicated by 15 NGOs working in areas with such problems. Child Relief and You (CRY), India’s most well-known NGO and donor agency working for child rights has showcased his work in their Childhood Matters series and made it mandatory for beneficiaries to replicate it.
With over 20 years of experience in the social sector, Muralimohan is widely respected in the area of Education for his success in training teachers and activists in non-formal education methods and for developing child-friendly models of education. He has worked with the famous M.V. Foundation and then set up Sadhana Educational Resource Centre to work with the lambadas. Strongly against the current education system’s focus on only literacy, Muralimohan’s vision is to nurture children and youth to grow into aware, alert and conscious citizens. Muralimohan lives in Hyderabad with his wife, who is a teacher and two sons, aged 16 and 12.
