In 1988, a young social work postgraduate student in Mumbai was given a routine assignment. She had to visit a slum and meet a couple of kids who’d dropped out of school, so that she could understand what was keeping them from school. “If I went to school in the morning, when would I get the time to work?” said one kid. One girl had to bunk school to look after her younger brother in the absence of her working parents. Another said his parents didn’t have the time to drop him to school. Yet another said that he’d recently migrated to Mumbai with his parents, and was yet to find his bearings. The stories were age-old — these kids were neither the first nor the last to tell them. But that day, when Bina Lashkari listened to those dropouts, a simple solution occurred to her. If these kids couldn’t go to school, could the school not go to them?
That very year, with the help of some private funding, she bought a bus, stripped it of seats and built a classroom, a library and a play area in it. Then she, and another teacher, began visiting those kids in their slum, and taught them for an hour every day. Thus, Doorstep School was born.
Today, Lashkari runs five such buses — four in Mumbai and one in Pune — with another in the pipeline. Doorstep School enrolls 1,000 children annually in municipal schools, and serves more than 50,000 children annually. In its mobile classrooms, teachers go to over 125 low-income neighbourhoods daily, stop for an hour and teach students not just the three R’s but give them some vocational training and computer education as well. But perhaps, most significantly, Doorstep School continues to serve students who may have given up on studies if their school hadn’t come to their doorsteps. For example, teenagers who unload fish in the Bombay docks during the day can attend evening classes, which are held in each lane of the slums between 7 pm and 9 pm.
Unlike conventional schools, these mobile classes have students of all ages and educational levels. This requires a lot of training for teachers, and this has also resulted in a less formal schooling pattern. While the Doorstep teachers follow a set timetable and schedule, maintain attendance registers and periodically evaluate their students just as they’d have done in conventional schools, they also allow a lot of leeway to students. “It’s not uncommon for a child to bring a younger sibling to class or to be called away by the mother to fill water, make chapattis, or mind a crying baby,” says Lashkari, adding, “but this relative freedom encourages them to become and remain part of the learning process.”
The concept of a classroom in a bus has worked well. “When I began teaching children in the Baba Saab Ambedkar Nagar in 1998, over 80 per cent children in that slum were out of school,” reminisces Lashkari, “but today, barely 10-15 per cent haven’t enrolled and they’re mainly children of new migrants.” Today when Lashkari visits the colony, she is struck by the high levels of awareness among the people there. “They want their rights now — clean water, ration cards and I-cards. Most of all, they value the power of education, now that they’ve seen their children study and avail themselves of opportunities earlier denied to them,” says she. Some ex-students now work in the US, others in MNCs. Most alumni of the school are ensuring that their own children go there as well. “They’ve shown me that education is truly the answer to all our problems,” says Lashkari.
Now we know what some out-of-the-box thinking and a couple of school buses can do.