Six years ago, Yuvraj Jadav moved to Mumbai with his parents from Gulbarga district, on the Maharashtra-Karnataka border. His father took a job with a business that sold construction material, and young Yuvraj helped him out, working long days starting from 7 a.m. This left the 11-year-old little time for school, so he effectively dropped out after class 6, which he had completed in Gulbarga.
When he turned 18 last year, Mr. Jadav decided to find the extra hours at the end of each long day — he still works 7 a.m. to 5.30 p.m. — to continue with his schooling. He joined Class VII at Guru Narayan Night School in Santa Cruz, where he attends classes from 6.30 p.m. to 9.30 p.m. The school is a modest establishment, with light green walls matching the muted green checks on his uniform shirt, and the deafening sound of planes flying overhead causing all conversation to pause every two or three minutes.
In this, his second shot at education, he is uncertain about what to expect. All he knows is that this is a chance to make a better life, and he has begun, slowly, hesitantly, to dream. “If I clear the SSC exam, then I want to go on to be a policeman or get some other government job,” he says with a shy smile.
Beacons in the night
The first night school, meant to provide education for adults who had missed out on schooling, was set up as far back as 1885 by the social reformer Jyotiba Phule. Since then their proliferation, in Mumbai in particular, is linked with the history of migrant labour and the city’s great tradition of philanthropy. The majority of night schools today are run by private trusts, set up by teachers, educationalists and a few businesspersons.
The Guru Narayan school was founded in 1961, by the Billawar Association, and it is currently one of 130 night schools in Mumbai (there are another 50 spread out across the districts of Maharashtra).
“The working students who join do a variety of jobs like working in canteens, hotels or in catering businesses,” says C. Ramchandran, principal of Guru Narayan since 1997. “The girls make chapatis in restaurants, do embroidery work or work in tailor shops.” The Billawar Association runs classes starting from the lower grades, but the night school concept focusses on Classes VIII to X. For some students, it is a stepping stone, for others a means to a short-term end. Mr. Ramchandran remembers students who have gone on to day colleges, and have become engineers; he also remembers middle-aged students come in to get a secondary school certificate to help them meet a work requirement. “We had a 40-year-old railway employee who got a good promotion after passing Class X, and some who came to get a Class VIII pass for various reasons, like getting a driving licence.”
The average age of students in this school though — as in most of the city’s night schools — is about 15 to 25. For some of the school-age children, it isn’t necessarily a job keeping them from a day school; they prefer to attend a night school because they have to be at home during the day to look after siblings or to help with household tasks. “During the day I help out at home,” says Sridevi, who is 16; her mother is a homemaker and he father runs a sandwich cart near Churchgate station. “It was more convenient for me to attend school at night. My aim is to get at least 90% in the SSC exams so I can apply for MBBS.”
Studying the gaps
In 2005, Nikita Ketkar, then a civil servant, was posted in Mumbai in 2005. She visited a couple of night schools to get an idea of how they run. “I realised that a lot had to be done to motivate the students,” she said. “The thing that really struck me was when I saw that science practicals [experiments meant to be done in a laboratory] were being taught on the blackboard. I thought that if these students are going to learn science like this, their chances of passing the SSC board exams were going to be slim. These are students who are coming in after a hard day’s work. They are self-motivated, and I thought that they should get the best resources so that they have a chance.”
Some schools have been success stories, but more because of the initiative of the trusts that run them.
In 2008, Ms. Ketkar took early retirement from her government job and started Masoom Education, an organisation that works on a structured model to improve night schools in Maharashtra. She immediately commissioned an organisation called Sattva to research other models of night schooling across the country. The research shows that while some States have night schools — Goa and Meghalaya stand out — they are run by private institutions, like churches. Maharashtra was the only State that had a somewhat formalised system, with government support for adults to complete their schooling. But, though around 15,000 to 20,000 students attend these institutions, they are not treated on par with day schools in terms of the resources. “The schools are run by the trusts,” Ms. Ketkar says, “but over 95% are housed in BMC premises, and they have to pay rent to run the schools for three hours every night. The salaries of the teachers are paid by the government; these are basically day school teachers who teach extra at night and are paid half their salaries more.”
In 2008, Masoom came up with a three-pronged intervention strategy.
First, help with infrastructure and quality inputs; besides providing notebooks and textbooks, Masoom created a lab on wheels to help with science practicals and developed foundation courses for students who joined in Class VIII but were still at learning levels of Class III or IV. Second, build capacity by training school principals and teachers. And third, get the government on board to frame policies in favour of night schools.
Through their advocacy, Masoom has managed to make some progress. In 2013, for instance, the State government approved meals for night school students. But by 2012, Ms Ketkar says, she realised that the other interventions in the 60 schools that Masoom had adopted across the city were not working. “A sense of lethargy had set in among the schools, and we felt that we needed to focus more on capacity-building and training stakeholders before moving out. The Maharashtra government had come out with a system of grading schools based on parameters like SSC pass percentage, attendance, and enrolment, and we gave ourselves the challenge of adapting those to our schools and to move as many schools up to Grade Five [the highest] within five years.”
Mixed results
Masoom’s interventions have had positive results, with SSC pass rates going up to over 70% in schools that earlier had a pass percentage in the low 30s. Nine of their schools boast a 100% pass percentage, with Guru Narayan being one of them.
Mumbai, 22/03/2017 : Guru Narayan Night School Prabhat Colony Santacruz East in Mumbai, India on March 22, 2017. Photo: Vijay Bate.
Yet challenges remain, with perhaps the major one being the fact that enrolment and attendance figures do not match.
Guru Narayan, for instance, is a Kannada-medium school, and the trust that runs it has done a lot of outreach work in the communities around them, to find students who have not completed schooling. By contrast, in the nearby Anand Night School in Vakola, which is Marathi-medium, the classes only have a handful of students and teachers say that enrolment can be a problem. Because this is a school where the total strength hasn’t crossed a hundred, there is no provision for a principal, and that makes administration difficult.
Finding premises is also a challenge now for some schools. Ms. Ketkar talks of a night school in the Fort area that, having lost its space, is now running in a tiny area, with cardboard partitions between classes. Others had a problem with paying rent to the BMC, as the trusts that started them are run by old teachers and educationalists who can’t afford to pay anymore. Recently, thanks to an understanding BMC official, Masoom managed to get lakhs-of-rupees-worth accumulated debts in rent from these trusts waived.
State funding is also a problem. Last year, due to budgetary restrictions, a government order in Maharashtra reduced the number of teachers in all schools. This had a knock-on effect on night schools, because it meant one less subject teacher. Masoom was prepared for this, and the organisation’s donors stepped up and provided for back-up teachers to cover the shortfall. But night schools where they don’t operate are still suffering.
There are 130 night schools in Mumbai alone. Another 50 are spread across Maharashtra.
Ashok Belsare, chairman of the Shikshak Bharati association of teachers and the advisor to the Night School Headmasters Association, says the shortage of teachers has hit night schools hard, as has the government’s decision, in 2004, to stop non-salary grants — for things like procuring stationery, for instance — given to night schools. “Many of the night schools are free, and others charge fees or four or five rupees, so they do need some financial support in order to run smoothly.”
Testing times
The system has its successes, but those tend to be because of the initiative or resources of the trusts that run them. Many more need to be bailed out. The government seems to do the minimum, without properly acknowledging night schools as an important part of the educational set-up.
There are several hurdles in the way of achieving this, not least of which is the fact that very little actual study has been done on night schools and no efforts made to find them a formal place within the system. Ms Ketkar says for instance that they don’t find mention in documents like the state planning commission reports despite there being close to 200 such institutions. And senior education officials, like south zone education inspector, B.B. Chavan, argue that night schools come under the category of alternative education that may be in violation of the Right to Education Act. “The Act says that all children should go toward mainstream education and night schools, as opposed to day schools which teach for six hours, teach for only two-and-a-half to three hours,” he says. Yet these are government-aided institutions, teaching a government-approved syllabus and whose students sit for a government-approved exam.
Masoom, Ms. Ketkar says, is currently trying to sign an agreement with the Maharashtra government to become the State’s implementing partner to improve night schools. “We have a dearth of private funding, and what we’re looking for now is a partnership with the government. We can’t go to another State and say we want to replicate this model if we don’t have a partnership with the government first.”
If the enrolment strength and attendance could be increased in night schools by improving results, doing more outreach and providing adequate teachers, then Ms. Ketkar feels that it could be a model, a Maharashtra legacy, that could successfully be implemented in other states.
