It’s an Indian school that has been in Iran since the 1930s. It shifted to its present location in Tehran in 1952 and became a Kendriya Vidyalaya in 2004; it currently teaches five languages. On Wednesday, it received a Rs. two-crore boost, the third such grant in the past four years.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s wife Gursharan Kaur announced the grant amid thunderous applause during a visit to the Central government-run school here. After that, she prayed at the adjacent gurdwara. The origins of the Kendriya Vidyalaya Tehran (KVT) go back to the southeastern province of Zahedan, when the first Indian settlers established a school in the 1930s.
“At that time, there were some 15-30 Sikh families in Zahedan and the school had about 30 students. It was then affiliated to the Punjab School Education Board,” KVT principal Jugal Kishore told IANS.
As the Indian families shifted to Tehran, so did the school.
Number dwindles
At its height, KVT had 350 students and was affiliated first to Panjab University and later to the Delhi-based Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE).
However, following the 1979 revolution, the number of Indian families dwindled to 60-65 and enrolment plummetedIn 2004, the Indian embassy decided to hand it over to the Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan (KVS).
The school was hit by a financial crisis in 2009-10 and would have gone under but for a Rs.81-lakh grant from the External Affairs Ministry, to which visiting Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar added a Rs.2-crore grant in 2011.
“Today, we have 189 students on our rolls from LKG to Class 12. Fifty-one of these are non-Indians. I am happy to tell you that our class 10 and 12 result has been 100 per cent in the past two years,” said Mr. Kishore.
“We go by the CBSE curriculum and also teach five languages: Hindi, English, French, Persian and Punjabi. Persian is taught more as a language of communication,” the principal added.
