Avinash Shrirame, 35 years old, enters a room that holds about 30 students on each other red and green uniforms. He greets him with a loud “good morning, sir”, and “Jai Seva” shouted three times to the rhythm of clapping. Shrirame asks students to open their textbooks when they turn to the board. The edging of the album is portraits of Rani Durgavati, Queen Gondwany, who fought with Mughals in the 16th century; And Baburao Shedmake, Chief of Gondu, who rose against the British in the 1857 war.
Shrirame is a volunteer for fees and teaches Gondi in Paramparik Koya Dayanbod Sanskar Ghotul School in Mohgaon, Gadchiroli. Gondi is a Gonds language, a tribe extended across at least seven states, including Karnataka, where the first standardized vocabulary was released in 2018 at Kannada University. India has the second largest tribal population in the world, 8.9%, according to the census in 2011.
The summer sun shines on the pink walls of the Shirame class, with children from classes 3 to 5 visiting Gondi class. “The last four years have been difficult,” says Shrirame, who arrived a year ago, from Bhiwapur, 165 km, after working in the bank for six years. He is a certified computer operator and programming assistant from the Industrial Training Institute (ITI), NAGPUR.
“We have been caught in a dispute and feels that school is stagnating because of it,” he says. He remembers his own childhood and his confusion that he could not understand English, the medium of education. “The other children of my age thought of the moon, I was just fossilized from grammar,” says Shrirame, who has learned Gondi in the last year.
The school is the only one in Mahari who teaches Gondi. It is up to class 5, Sanyukt Ganrajya Gram Sabha Parisad, a group of 15 grams of Sabhas (village councils, at the basic level of tribal administration), including Mohgon.
In 2022, the school received a notice from the Maharashtra Education Department that it was not registered with Zila Parisad, the elected body at the peak of the village level at the district level. Notification required to be closed.
In November 2022, Gram Sabha Parisad filed a petition in HC asking for recognition. The case is still on and the school plan to start class 6 was postponed for an indefinite period. Teachers are afraid that 16 children in class 5 will have to leave the school if they cannot run class 6.
The seven -room Ghotul re -connects the school members of the Gond tribe with their language, which threatens to include marathi, like other states where the Gonds are. Thirty Lakzy speaks with this language with their roots in the Family Language family, says a research worker based in Karnataka Ganesh Narayandas Devy, who led a linguist survey in India, which provides an overview of endangered languages.
The school runs at Ashram Shala Shala Tribal Department and teaches regular items such as mathematics, history, English and marathi. Books for these subjects are delivered by the Ministry at no cost, as well as the norm. Gondi is a supplement. The Gondi warrant was brought from a school in the village of Chhattisgarh in the Kanker district, about 250 km from Mohgaon. There is no teacher training for Gondi, so Shrirame learns older in the tribe and uses YouTube to help him with teaching methods. All teachers use Gondi as an informal way of teaching students so that they can easily understand the concepts.
The mother tongue matters
The idea of establishing a school focusing on Gondi stems from the need to revive the language and give gondish culture to children and youth, to protect language and knowledge from extinction. A Gram Sabha Parisad went through a resolution on the start of the school in February 2020. A year later they wrote a letter that Bhagat Singh Koshyari approved a residential English high school.
The ongoing class at school. In addition to Gondi, the school teaches mathematics, history, English and marathi. | Photo Credit: Emmanual Yogini
In the letter, the representatives of the village stated that India was a signatory statement on the rights of the indigenous people received by the UN on 13 September 2007. The tribal community therefore had the right to establish and control the independent school to educate its students through their native language. This started in February 2021 Namdeo Userndi, then the Congress.
The planned areas – mostly occupied by tribes – are governed by Panchayat (extension to the planned areas, Pesa), 1996. Gram Sabha Parisad says that the school is a constitutional body because it falls under the dog.
However, the Ministry of Education claims that the school does not fall within the Law on Education Right (RTE) of 2009 because it is not registered. In the notification sent by the ministry that the school violates Section 18 (5) of the right to free and compulsory education of children from 2009. This part stipulates that anyone who establishes a school without a certificate of recognition will have to pay a fine of 1 lakh in failure to touch and 10,000 GBP per day.
Between laws
“Why did the Ministry of Education penalize us? Our region falls under the planned area and the self -government is constitutional,” says Devsai Aatla, 47 years, a member of the Gram Sabha Parisad and the landowner at which the school operates. His grandchildren are studying here.
When Devsai walked along the shores of the pond behind the classroom, he says that no efforts were made from the country’s independence 75 years ago. “Marathi is not our identity, but the government is still imposing it,” says Devsai, adding that the history of gondes remains undocumented. Representative of the school official Zila Parisad Vivek Nakade says: “We have not received any proposal for school. In our routine check, we found that school operations were unauthorized and then sent a notice.” Nakade says the government is not against schools: “Everything we require is registration according to the law RTE.”
Gondi is not among the 22 official languages of India in the eighth plan of the Constitution. However, the National Educational Policy of the Year 2022 recommended “the promotion of multilingualism in education at all levels to get the opportunity to study in their own language”. Primers (textbooks) in 104 dialects were developed to support learning based on maternal and languages in the early years. While Gondi-Odia has a primer, the dialect spoken in the mahara.
Gram Sabha Parishad wants a unified district information system for education plus (UDISE+) code based on the Pesa law. “This will help students gain admission to courses after school. We could also expand for class 5 with minimal difficulty,” says Devsai. Within Udis, the Ministry of Education collects details of the school on its resources and assigns the number to the school, so it counts. A member of the Gram Sabha Parisad and the student of the student, Maniram Aatla, 35, points out that the school is based on the lines of Ghotulu, the community space for socialization, sharing knowledge and involvement in cultural activities.
Resources and funding
In the room next to the classroom of the pink wall “a, ara”; “E, era”; and “u, ura” are gondi words that are sung. The six -year -old says “A” and the class corresponds to the “Ara” choir, sitting on the floor in the middle of books and bags. The wall has graphs of Gondi and the English alphabet. The room acts as a classroom for first and second students during school hours and doubles as a hostel for girls after school.
Students inside the school class focused on Gondi. | Photo Credit: Emmanual Yogini
The residential school works from three rooms and holds 69 students: 31 girls and 38 boys. Devsai claims, “We have many people who ask about acceptance, but no longer admit, because the litigation has caused things uncertain.”
Students come from more than 20 villages in the district of Gadchiroli, including Pendhari and Hadapeth in the Dhanora block, and Rekhabhatal and Kasansur in the Stage Block, at least 65 km from Mohgaon.
The school is financed by the income of all villages that are part of the Gram Sabha Parisad. From March to the first half of June, people from these 15 villages meet to collect Tendis leaves used to pack Bidis. The leaves are packed in 70 packages, which are given by the Gram Sabha, and later brought to the gram of Sabha Parisad, where it is sold.
The money obtained is divided among the villagers, depending on how much they gathered after they kept 5%. This is used to finance the school. The school is supported by gifts on stationery from non -governmental organizations. Some parents also contribute. Devsai says: “We require infrastructure to accommodate more students and funds to pay teachers what they deserve.”
Culture and competition
The Hindi analysis of Udise data shows that in 2022 the level of premature completion of the studies between girls in Maharištře was higher than the national average of the secondary stage of school attendance. In addition, the gap is in the extent of premature completion of school attendance between girls from the non -reserved category and the ST category in the state significantly wider than the national average. Moreover, the rate at which Maharashtra has narrowed this gap in the last eight years was significantly slower compared to progress on a national level.
“Students turn to education because of language difficulties,” says Sheshrao Gawade, 28 years, who teaches science and Gondi at school. “Teaching children in Gondi can help us explore so many opportunities and this school will be a great experiment. We have so many plans. We want to introduce the knowledge of Gonda about medicinal plants and herbs,” he says.
In the village of Pendhari, about 5 km from the school, Manda Aatla (38) sitting near Murmund (wooden column with floral carvings) in the middle of the cottage, which supports achievement. Murmunda (Mur is a marriage in Gonda) is a symbol of marriage installed during the wedding ceremony in the house of men’s parents.
Manda just came home after she gathered the flowers Mahua throughout the day. These are used throughout the year to cook and make juices and alcohol. Manda is proud of the acquaintance of her son with a script Gondi. He can only speak a tongue. He shows a workbook of his ten -year -old son and says, “Gondi makes it easier for him to teach other languages. He quickly understands when the English words are explained.”
More than 35 km from Pendhari, is the village of Kasansur, where another parent, 45 years old, says that his nine-year-old daughter, who is studying at the Gondi-State, keeps concepts faster compared to his other daughter at the Etapalli Zila Parisad School.
One of the reasons why extracurricular activities that integrate their lives at home with their curriculum. Students participate in songs, narratives and dances. “We have a folklore that speaks of the development of people, gravity, mythology and the art of life,” adds Devsai.
Officer of the Ministry of the tribal department on the condition of anonymity says: “When we visited school, students looked cheerful. Students do not feel under pressure.” He says that one of the school registration is to go on the ASHRAM Shala route, a residential school created for tribes. “It is bizarre that the pesa can facilitate the decision on the JAL (water), jungle, jam (land), but not education. That would be an experiment and the government should think of these lines,” says Devy.
(With VIGNESH R.)
snehal.mutha@thehind.co.in
Edit Sunalini Mathew
Published – April 5, 2025 9:06
