Shanti and Bharati do not love canoeing, but knowing how to paddle a canoe helped the two tribal girls from Odisha’s Angul district continue with their schooling. For a year, until two days ago, Shanti Sinku and Bharati Laguri, students of Class X, crossed the Rengali reservoir every day to attend classes.
The girls would set out for school around 8 a.m. After a 15-minute walk, they would paddle for 45 minutes to cover about a kilometre. They would walk another kilometre to reach their school.
“The trip on this route continued for a whole year. Thanks to a TV report, the administration persuaded our families to let us stay in a relative’s house, closer to the school,” said Shanti.
Before they started taking this route, they would travel 12 km by road, a major part of which passed through dense forests, to reach their school. They thought it was no longer safer to traverse such a long distance on a daily basis and so opted for the shorter but potentially-dangerous route.The administration intervened once the TV report drew its attention to the girl’s journey. “Due to our intervention, the two girls have started residing in their brother-in-law’s house from Saturday. “In tribal societies, education has never been a priority. But these girls took a lot of trouble to get educated,” Lalit Mohan Sahoo, headmaster of their school, said.
