Move on tribal education flayed

BHUBANESWAR: The government's recent announcement to impart mother tongue-based early childhood education in 19 tribal languages has come in for flak from social workers. Some of them even termed it a poll gimmick.
They pointed out that in 2012 a decision was taken at a meeting chaired by the then chief secretary B K Patnaik to provide mother tongue-based early childhood education in 10 tribal languages.But there is acute shortage of textbooks and trained teachers in those languages. In that case, a fresh announcement to include nine more languages is bit strange, a social worker said.
"More than 14 lakh tribal children don't have access to pre-school education and the dropout rate is almost 50% by Class V. To improve the figures, we need to have more textbooks in their languages, culture-appropriate curriculum and anganwadi centres with educated tribal workers. But these are yet to happen," pointed out tribal campaigner Sudhir Kumar Digal. Since the state government could not get pre-school textbooks published in 10 languages for tribal children, why are they announcing to have education in 19 languages? This gives an impression that it may be a pre-election stunt, said another activist Gopinath Majhi.
School and mass education secretary Usha Padhee said, "We are aware of the problems and have already provided the requisite curriculum to women and child development department. The printed materials would be sent to anganwadi centres soon. Also, we are recruiting more than 3,000 tribal youths as teachers, who would teach in those 10 languages."