A Schoolteacher Champions Free Education for Children in One India Slum

Trikuta Nagar, Indian administered Jammu and Kashmir — In 2004, Kanchan Sharma, 62, was passing a slum in Jammu district’s Trikuta Nagar when she saw several children, around eight or nine years old, begging for money on the street. Some were chewing tobacco. They were children of migrants, she said, who had emigrated from Pipri, a village in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, over the last 30 to 40 years to find better economic prospects.

Panhandling is a known issue in Jammu, where families migrating from other states across the country take refuge in makeshift shelters built from recycled materials like tarpaulin sheets, bamboo, cardboard, and plants. The children, Sharma said, will often collect recyclables or panhandle to help support their families.

Sharma was a teacher at a government girls’ high school at the time. “I thought instead of giving them rupees, it would be better to empower them with education.” She convinced three of the children to enroll in her school, as well as to invite any of the other children from the slum to join them. She said she gained 40 new students to the high school. “It was a pleasing moment for me,” Sharma told Women Under Siege.

But when she transferred to another school later that year, all 40 children dropped out within a month after her transfer. Sharma then approached the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan — a flagship program of the Universalization of Elementary Education (UEE) formulated by the Government of India — for help, to no avail. After that, she decided to open a makeshift school at Maratha Mohalla, a slum area in the northern part of Jammu just a few meters from where she first encountered the children.

The school, named Sangarh Vidya Kendra, officially opened in 2009 to provide the children an education free of cost, with due permission from the Jammu and Kashmir education department. The children were also provided free uniforms, book bags, and stationery. The number of students ebbs and flows as families move in search of a stable livelihood, but at present, there are more than 100 children who gather under the makeshift tin-roofed shed to learn.

The first task, Sharma said, was to win the trust of their parents. “I will provide every sort of help to your children — if they agree to study,” Sharma told them. The real challenge was convincing the parents that education for their children could help lift them out of poverty — a difficult argument to make when some of the families wholly depended on their child’s earnings. In some cases, one or both of the parents suffered from addiction and relied on their children’s panhandling to earn the family an income.

“They were not in favor of sending their children to school,” Sharma said.

With a team of four other teachers, Sharma also runs extracurricular activities at her school, such as sports and debate teams, “to divert their minds from begging,” she said. “Now they take part in literary and physical activities, and take care of their bodies and keep their uniforms neat and clean.”

“We have tough challenges here,” said Monika Sharma, 25, one of the teachers at Sangarh Vidya Kendra. “But we will leave no stone unturned to change their way of life.”

During the Covid-19 pandemic, which has devastated the country, schools in Jammu closed for nearly two years — including Sharma’s. But while other schools went online, Sharma’s students couldn’t afford to buy smartphones for classwork, so Sharma purchased as many as she could afford. When she learned that some of the students had stopped attending online classes to resume panhandling, she decided to incorporate two-hour offline classes once a week to keep the students focused on their studies.

“We feel lucky that she has taken this initiative to uplift our children,” said Amit Shankar, 42, a father of two of Sharma’s students, ages eight and 12.

Before being enrolled in Sharma’s school, the children were picking through garbage for recyclables. One of them was Abass, 14.

“I was begging in the streets and carrying loads of kawad (plastic waste) on my back,” he said. “I consider myself the luckiest kid in the world to see a school bag on my back [now].”

Under the National Policy on Education of 1986, the government provides free and compulsory elementary education to all children aged 14 and under, but Sharma’s school is considered private, and, “there is no protocol of the government to provide any assistance to private schools,” said Sharma. Consequently, she’s been covering the costs to operate the school, paying her teachers’ salaries through her savings and retirement funds.

Despite winning various accolades over the years (and, most recently, the “Women of Steel” award from the Gujjar Charitable Trust for her work with the children), no outside funding has come in to support her school. After 13 years personally financing Sangarh Vidya Kendra, at long last, Sharma is running out of money.

Her dream of turning the school into an actual brick-and-mortar building will have to wait. “I wish the government would come forward to help me.”