A head teacher posted at the primary school in the remote village of Gobindpur in West Bengal goes beyond his academic responsibilities to revamp the dilapidated school and transform the village.
Fondly addressed as marang pandit – which means a great scholar in Santhali – Amitava Misra is the head teacher of a primary school in Gobindpur, a remote village in West Bengal. He is also the ‘guardian’ to hundreds of villagers in the region.
Way back in April 2006, when the then 35-year-old Misra took charge of the school as the sole teacher in this tribal village in Purulia district of West Bengal, there were just two dilapidated rooms with mud walls in the name of classrooms.
A large banyan tree nearby served as the actual ‘classroom’, under which a handful of children occasionally came to sit. The village had neither electricity nor access to drinking water. Without an approach road to the village, a few spells of rain were enough to maroon it.
But with the persistent efforts of Misra, the school as well as the village have had a tremendous transformation, winning accolades in the process.
The most formidable challenge for this Bengal teacher had been to find social acceptance amongst the villagers and help them join the social mainstream.
“The lack of infrastructure and other facilities did not perturb me as much as seeing the villagers being so used to open defecation, liquor addiction and ignorance on basic health and nutrition,” recalled Misra. “I started door-to-door visits to educate the villagers of health, hygiene, nutrition and the importance of education.”
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A handful of village youth got motivated by his initiatives. Together, they started adult education centres in the village. Initially reluctant, the villagers gradually started trickling into these centres, which soon became lively meeting places, bustling with ideas and activities.
“More village youth came forward, and we organised ourselves into various groups,” said Suraj Hansda, a 27-year-old resident of the village. He added that such groups became responsible for coordinating with respective state departments and pursuing them to get different works done on village welfare and amenities.
Within the next 5-6 years, Gobindpur scripted history by becoming one of the first open-defecation-free villages in the state with funding from the state government. Each of the 240 houses in the village had its own toilet. In 2015, UNICEF recognised Gobindpur for its best practices in sanitation and hygiene and even made a documentary film to highlight them.
At the same time, the village also got electrified. Tube wells were dug, and villagers had access to clean drinking water. An approach road to the village was laid.
The erstwhile crumbling Gobindpur Primary School building got converted to a pucca building and a boundary wall was also constructed. Today, it has six classrooms, a library, four toilets and a playground.
The transformation of the school is evident from the fact that the number of students attending classes regularly now is nearly 200, who study from pre-nursery to Class V, up from 15-17 children attending sporadically in 2006. The school runs on solar power, operating fans, LED bulbs and other appliances.
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Funded by the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, with contributions from local community members and also by Misra himself, the school today sustains three part-time teachers, mid-day meal cooks and a gardener.
Gobindpur Primary School has emerged today as a model school under Total Literacy Mission (TLM). It has won 18 awards, including prominent ones like the Jamini Roy Award (2015) and Best School Award in State (2016). The school received the National Swachh Vidyalay Puraskar (2017) from the then HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar for excellence in water, sanitation and hygiene in schools.
According to Proloyendu Bhoumick, District Inspector of Schools (Primary Education), the teaching practices here blend traditional and latest techniques perfectly. The children are even well-versed with digital learning through projectors and computers. The training begins at the pre-primary level, where the children are taught Bangla, English and maths using digital calendars and digital pens.
Because of its practices, the school has attracted exposure visits by more than 1,000 teachers from different schools in the district, besides educationists from Japan.
As per the TLM curriculum, the children are also taken on nature studies and educational tours. The walls of the school classroom are adorned with murals depicting curricular materials, indigenous culture, wildlife and forests.
“I was touched by the beautiful bonding shared between the students and teachers and the involvement of local communities in the school’s activities,” said Bhoumick.
Misra has won numerous awards for teaching, including the 2018 National Teachers’ Award and the State Shiksha Ratna.
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He is also a writer and poet, with 14 books in Bangla to his credit, besides articles in different newspapers on various social issues and education.
Misra also trained and encouraged the village youth to offer different services such as distributing oxygen cylinders, food, medicines, masks and sanitisers, in addition to disinfecting villages, during the pandemic.
The children and their parents have planted over 100 species of trees in and around the school campus.
“Environment and forests have always been very close to my heart,” said Misra, who has an innovative idea to fight plastic pollution.
“The children have been trained to make eco-bricks from plastic bottles,” he said. Plastic throwaway packets are collected from across the village, cut into small pieces, and squeezed into these bottles, which, when tightly filled, are sealed by mortar. These replace conventional bricks in the school and its garden.
In addition, the village women are trained in various livelihood activities such as aquaculture, livestock rearing, mushroom cultivation and weaving items out of locally available babui grass, for additional household income.
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According to Anant Manjhi, a 65-year-old village elder, teachers had come and gone in the past, but they had hardly made any change in their lives. “Today, we are aware of the importance of education and our village is 100 percent literate,” he asserted proudly.
The lead image at the top shows students and staff members in front of the revamped primary school building in Gobindpur. (Photo by Nisha Manjhi)
Moushumi Basu is a Kolkata-based journalist.
