Yule lessons for pavement dwellers

KOLKATA: The Andrew Yule top brass have been making a beeline to impart education, not to management trainees, but to destitutes who live on the pavements or road-side jhupris in Dalhousie, earn their living doing odd jobs during the day and blowing them away at night either boozing or gambling. It is a night school starting from Wednesday night on the roof of Andrew Yule headquarters which will teach students from the age of 8 to 80 banking, health and hygiene and citizens' right, besides conventional primary education.
The company officials had approached the footpath-dwellers, hawkers and jhupri-dwellers. "Our words appeared to be too good to be true to them. But they realised that our intention is good. Now, quite a large number of people are interested to join the school, where we will offer students some snacks," said Subhasish Mukherjee, the coordinator of the school and Yule's deputy general manager (human resources).
Many top executives of the company have come forward for teaching these people. Chief executive of our the division Sunil Munshi and his wife Anju Munshi, general manager of Yule's associate company Tide Water Ganesh Dev Moulick, senior officers like Subhasish Mukherjee, Satyendra Kumar Pandey, Arundhati Chakraborty and Aniruddha Haldar have enlisted themselves as teachers, said Indrajit Sengupta, director (Personnel) of Andrew Yule.
Yogi Yadav, 66, is a student of this school and works as a porter. He said: "I always regretted my lack of education. My life could have been different, if I had education. Now, I am not only learning letters and words, but also how to do banking transactions. I now can share my knowledge with my school-going grandsons."
"It has been long since we have been thinking of doing something for these people. After toying with many ideas, schooling emerged as the best idea as knowledge destroys ignorance. Then we then worked on the syllabus. For the time being, we have made it thrice-a-week. If we make it weeklong programme, there might be drop-outs. Gradually, we may make it all week-day programme," he added.
Already, 37 people have enrolled in the school. If it is a success, we may increase batches and the infrastructure. We have included the practical issues they face like hygiene, drug addiction, alcoholism, AIDS, family planning and day-to-day public relations. The participants will be given idea about how to communicate with various authorities and banking transactions, said Subhasish Mukherjee.