The script on the makeshift classroom's blackboard is unfamiliar in this part of the country. The small group of students under the thatched roof in a corner of a brick kiln in Poochi Athipedu, Tiruvallur, is learning all right, but in Oriya.
Children of migrant labourers who move to the village to work in brick kilns between January and May every year, the only way they can learn is if they are taught in their mother tongue. The only way they learn is if a school is set up within the brick kiln premises itself. The only way they can get back to a regular school at home, in western Orissa.
The labourers largely come from Bolangir, Bargarh, Kalahandi, Naupada and Sonepur districts, says Dayasagar Pradhan, a Hindi/Telugu/Oriya speaking co-ordinator appointed to supervise the schools, by Aide et Action, an NGO. The organisation runs eight schools for as many kilns or chambers where at least 257 children stay and work with their families. There are 60 chambers in Tiruvallur district alone.
It is the lack of employment opportunities after the first grain is harvested during the Naukhai festival that drives these labourers to indentured labour in the kilns of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, explains Mr. Pradhan. Also, the expenses during the Naukhai are financed by Sardars or middlemen, who then contract them out to kilns in other States, year after year. The advance amounts range between Rs.20,000 to Rs.50,000 and each family is expected to ‘cut' at least a 1,000 bricks a day, for which they get paid Rs.170.
While the owners do not object to running a school there, they are annoyed if the work is not completed. The children obviously have to help, after and before they come to school.
Those who are 14 years or older do not even go to the transit schools. All of them, however, are instructed to say they do not work in the kilns. Only one hand hesitantly goes up when the class is asked whether they chip in with the brick-making. But a look at the children's wrinkled fingers tells the truth of the long hours spent moulding wet mud.
Predictably there are no specialists to treat these children for such conditions. Inhaling the red dust and working in the baking huts leaves them with problems that need attention. What they have is a person who calls himself a Registered Medical Practitioner and dispenses drugs arbitrarily.
“We don't know if this RMP has a medical degree. Once he gave a labourer who complained of stomach pain drugs to induce labour,” Mr. Pradhan says.The SSA grants a certificate after the child attends 90 days of class in a transit school. This can be used later to promote the child to the next class when he gets back home.
