Bastar villagers want govt to take over school abandoned by Reds

RAIPUR: Once, Mao's ‘Little Red Book' was the syllabus here. Today, little children learn tables in the shade of a mango tree or in one of the sheds abandoned by Maoists when they retreated. In this extremely remote part of Abujhmarh in Bastar, this no-walls school is the only hope for hundreds of kids.

When the Maoists' word was the law in these parts, their so-called ‘Janatana Sarkar' ran ‘schools' to impart Maoist ideology to children. When security forces began piling on the pressure, Maoists began fleeing their erstwhile strongholds. This school is in one such region of Narayanpur district, some 300km from Raipur.

After the insurgents moved out in 2016, the school lay abandoned for years until some educated youngsters volunteered to teach children of primary school age. They named it Bhoomkal — after the 1910 tribal uprising against the British.

Villagers from 12 panchayats now want the govt to take over the school. Some of them met the district collector on Friday and handed over a memorandum, asking that the school be affiliated to the state board and its young volunteer teachers be absorbed as ‘Shikshadoots'.

TOI had visited this very school — on a hill, about 150km from the district headquarters — a couple of years ago. What was left were some sheds with rickety structures that once held up planks to serve as benches.

There were signs of where a kitchen once stood. Villagers were still wary of talking to outsiders, afraid that Maoists have eyes and ears in the forest. After all, the school had seen the Salwa Judum days.

Covid gave it a new lease of life. When educated youth started returning home with their families during the lockdown, they were worried that their children would miss out on schooling. Some of them decided to resume teaching under the abandoned shed.

In 2021, a proposal was passed by a dozen village panchayats that they would collectively pay salaries to teachers and arrange for food and books.

Now, ‘Bhoomkal' residential school has 115 students from Class 1-5. In fact, it had a whopping 400 students — a big number for these parts — till four months ago but attendance plummeted soon after a major encounter in nearby Rekavaya where eight Maoists were killed on May 23-24.

Still, these many students are a hundred too many to be ignored. Some villagers suggested shifting Bhoomkal School to the outer reaches of the region for better accessibility. But by now, it has turned into a symbol of pride.

Most villagers said the school should continue to run where it is, and all they need is govt affiliation because the students would have no future without board marksheets.

Sanjay Panth, state president of Bhartiya Kisan Union, speaking on behalf of the villagers, said that all erstwhile ‘Janatana Sarkar' schools in Sukma, Bijapur and Dantewada districts should be taken over by govt.

According to officials, the demand to affiliate Bhoomkal School is genuine but shifting it to a safer area can be immediately considered. This region is barely 40km from Thulthuli, the site of the biggest encounter in Bastar in which 38 Maoists were gunned down.


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