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Education is a mandatory step toward a bright future but more than that it is a right of every individual. However, these rights often vary as per privilege, there are still places and villages in India where quality education is a myth and even the education is provided with bare minimum efforts by both the government and the teachers. Dhakadkhedi is a witness of the same. It is a village in Manasa Tehsil under the Neemuch District in Madhya Pradesh. With lockdown and covid conditions restricting people at their homes. Many of the students were confined to their homes while most had to drop out of school during covid and even post covid. As per the reports of the Right to Education Forum approximately 10 million girls dropped out of school due to covid as a reason but it largely is due to inadequate family income, less digital accessibility, and even family constraints.
No Access to Education in Dhakadkhedi
A total of 160 families amounting to a total population of 784, Dhakadkhedi is a small tribal village with 63 girls and 73 boys who have no access to education. Although the Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh, Shivraj Singh Chauhan launched various policies and platforms for students to learn even during the pandemic.
Madhya Pradesh government introduced 3 different policies to accelerate the growth of learning, these policies include DigiLEP, Mohalla, and Doordarshan. CM Shivraj Singh Chauhan introduced DigiLEP in April 2020 as a learning enhancement program aiming to provide online education to students from 1st to 8th and claimed to be one of a kind.
These policies failed for the most crucial reason of less accessibility digital wise among the students. Many students are either deprived of access to mobile phones or any digital devices and the ones who have access like 5 girls out of the 63 girls in Dhakadkhedi have, but these too are falling short of the resource of daily mobile recharge.
The Mohalla classes are supposed to be taken by the teachers of government schools between the timing of 10:00 am to 2:00 pm where they gather students of all ages and attend them while other students wait for their turn. Only five to six children were attending these sessions as parents either were not willing to send their children or else they found the teaching technique dissociative. Due to a lack of supply of midday meals and sports and co-curricular activities parents were not willing to send their children to such sessions.
Apart from this, students also don’t have access to television and radio so comparatively digital accessibility is a far-fetched idea. The main source of income in Dhakadkhedi is agriculture where farmers are paid on the basis of daily wages of rupees 150/- per day, and in this amount, they have to take care of their entire family and struggle to meet ends. This is not just a problem with Dhakadkhedi but most of its nearby villages such as Danthalai, Khedabaraji, Makodi Modi, Kundalia Khurd, Gothra, and many more.
The Bottom Line
This is not just the case in Dhakadkhedi but also in most of the rural and tribal areas where the inaccessibility of digitalization and modern school and study medium poses a great challenge that the government is trying but failing on and again to tackle.
The solution lies in the problem itself, firstly the basic minimum necessities should be a cause of concern for the government as it is for the children and their parents. The adequate supply of mid-day meals, sanitary pads, textbooks, and notebooks and also the application of the traditional way of teaching and then pursuing a little modern and digital way of learning and adequate supply of the same.
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