Fugas

Dumka is primarily an underdeveloped tribal district with 1.5 million population. Its villages resemble medieval hamlets with no modem institutions, no modem facilities like roads, electricity, housing and health. There are no industries or mines and it is mainly dependent on rice cultivation during monsoon rains. Tribals constitute about 42 percent of the population; non-tribal populations are mainly migrants from the plains of central and northern Bihar who have settled in clusters of small towns scattered throughout the district. These small towns are local business centres and serve as the nearest consumer markets for the people of Dumka. Inaccessibility and poor infrastructure have slowed the process of development in the area. But Dumka’s real life consists in small dispersed tribal hamlets with huts and thatched mud dwellings, where subsistence farming is done among the tough rocky terrain of the Chotanagpur plateau. The fertility of the soil is very poor owing to extensive erosion, acidity and low water-retaining capacity of the soil. Tribals have to migrate every season to neighbouring districts or far-off places to supplement their income through manual labour. These tribal villages are different from non-tribal villages both in linguistic character and social composition14. ‘Santhali’ happens to be a non-literary and non-standardised language, and hence government elites consider it unsuited for more literate purposes. Notwithstanding its constitutional non-recognition as a language of literacy and learning, and despite the fact that it is spoken by 3.6 million tribals o f the Chotanagpur region, it has no place either in schools or in state-craft. ‘Santhali’ is used by tribals only as a ‘domestic vernacular’ with no functions except those in the home, places of rituals and the local market place. Officially at least on government records, there are some 1600 Primary Schools, 250 Middle Schools and 58 High Schools for the total of 4109 villages in Dumka15. All these schools are supposed to teach through the medium of standard Hindi. Teachers are mostly ill-trained non-tribals and they have to follow the

14 This has been already discussed in the first part o f this chapter. For more details, see Surendra K. Gupta, ‘Traditional and Emerging Political Structures’ in S.C. Dube (ed.) (1977), Tribal Heritage o f India. Vol. 1 Ethnicity. Identity and Interaction , 170-174

15 These sources are based on Dumka District TLC/PLC Proposal submitted to the Government o f India. No date o f its publication is given but it seems it was submitted in autumn o f 1994.

standard syllabus and curriculum of the mainstream schools of non-tribal areas16. There are

110 private or model schools of the modem type except for one Navodaya Vidyalaya and the

majority are poorly maintained government schools which have existed now for some decades.

Some of these schools are so poor and inadequate that 110 regular teaching and

learning is possible. Their accessibility and usefulness in terms of actual advantages gained by local population are negligible. In most of the informal discussions with lower district officials and seven of the Key Resource Persons (KRPs) of District TLC, it emerged that

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hardly one-fourth of these government schools work . A few villagers admitted that many schools exist only on official paper and a few of these had no buildings of their own18. Tribal families, and particularly tribal girls, have suffered continued disadvantage. They do not wish to attend the Hindi-medium schools and prefer to remain outside its unhelpful atmosphere, because even after learning to read and write a little on their own, they generally never make it to the higher stages of education. As a consequence, all the modern institutions which they encounter in their daily life such as the courts, district administration, teacher-training colleges, health services, banking institutions, etc. continue to be dominated by elite or literate Dikus (non-tribals). The class, gender and linguistic bias of these modem institutions has made them a fortified structure alien to the majority of the tribal people. The first main problem for tribal children is to overcome their own lack of motivation towards attending these impoverished schools. Secondly, they have to overcome the more significant hurdle of adapting culturally to the standard Hindi school curriculum and speech nonns. There has been no attempt to change or reform the non-tribal bias in the curriculum and the language of instruction. The administration generally assumes that tribals prefer to educate themselves in the dominant language of the area. But this is only partly true. Even if true, the mistake lies in the assumed baseline o f linguistic competence,

16 Interview and group discussion on 24/11/1994 with seven of die nine District TLC Key Resource Persons (KRPs) at Masalia Block High School. These KRPs were all State High School teachers. One o f them who wanted to remain anonymous, confessed diat most o f his colleagues in schools were incapable o f teaching the tr ibal students in a combined medium of Hindi and Santhali.

17 Interview and group discussion with seven KRPs on 24/11/1994 at Masalia High School, several other informal meetings with lower district officials in Dumka District Headquarters.

18 An evening witii some 32-36 villagers (including 9-10 men and women adult learners, 2 KRPs, 3VTs and a few children and old persons) who had gathered to see a Nukkad-natcik (street play) staged by village TLC team on 02/12/1994. The two o f the VTs reported tiiat there did not exist any school building before. But as a reward for being first to start with TLC, the district administration had promised to fund for a school building and the near-by main road construction under the Jawahar Rojgar Yojana (JRY) - centr al government scheme for self-employment. Similar experiences were reported in a few villages visited in other CD Blocks in Dumka.

social knowledge and identity of the tribals which is not taken into consideration by the mainstream school curriculum and instruction.

According to the 1991 Census, Dumka has a total literacy rate of 27.9 percent19 which is less than 30 percent - a government criterion for identifying least literate districts. However, Dumka is not included in this categoiy as figures for Dumka are still integrated with other slightly more developed districts which formed part of the former Santhal Pargana district, of which Dumka was the headquarters. Within the 27.9% literacy in Dumka, literacy for all males is about 40% and for females is as low as 14%. Literacy for the SCs is about 17% and that for the STs about 19%. According to the 1991 Census, the total number of illiterates in the entire district is about 1.1 million but the TLC target for the

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age group of 10-35 has been fixed at 0.384 million only . In the Jama Block where we did our field-study, it was reported by the Block Development Officer (BDO) and the Circle Officer (CO) that out of nearly 305 villages in the Block, only about 100 villages (about 35%) were actually covered by the TLC21. A Block is the smallest administrative unit (covering some 10-15 villages in an area of about 60-70 sq. kms.) for government planning and development projects. So we find that at each stage of implementation the coverage and scope of TLC has been narrowed down to the population or groups of ‘illiterates’ within convenient reach of officials. Even within this constricted coverage o f TLC, we will see how the government tries to fudge its figures of literacy achievements.