A survey held last month on school and college dropouts in Edamalakudi, one of the remotest tribal panchayats in Kerala comprising 26 settlements spread over vast tracts of forests in the Munnar forest division, threw up some startling figures.
Conducted by the Rajagiri Outreach Society for Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA), Kerala, it revealed that issues of accessibility and assistance had forced 85 students to discontinue formal education, mostly in the upper primary and high school levels, since 2004. Not an endearing scenario for a population of 2,236 tribespeople from 700-odd families. There is no one in the community who is professionally qualified. The only postgraduate, a woman, has been married off and remains unemployed at her husband’s place in Palakkad. Graduates number about 10 while 28 students have studied up to Plus Two. The silver lining is that some 223 students continue their schooling at places such as Munnar, Marayur, Adimali and Painavu and a minuscule fraction of it goes to college at Muvattupuzha and Ernakulam.
Edamalakudi’s only school, the Government Tribal Lower Primary School, that was begun as far back as 1979 with 108 students at Societykudi, the second settlement from the Eravikulam National Park side and the nerve centre of the panchayat, now has only 32 students in lower primary classes while another 10 attend the upper primary classes run as a bridge programme by the SSA. “If a society’s sense of fairness and justice is to be judged by how it has made room for the weaker and marginalised sections to come up, Kerala will have almost nothing to be proud of, given the way it has closed the doors of education on this tribal population,” scoffs C.S. Murali, president of the Kerala Dalit Mahasabha, who flagged the issue of suspension of higher studies by tribal students, especially in central Kerala, for want of post-matric Scheduled Tribe hostels.
Misery and hardship
For the Muthuvans of Edamalakudi, the path to school is strewn with misery and hardship. From most settlements, located far and wide and covering 106 sq km of dense forest area, it takes at least a three-hour walk along undulating jungle trails to reach the school at Societykudi. To make up for this, three multi-grade learning centres (MGLCs), popularly known as single-teacher schools, function at the Parappayar, Meenkuthy and Edalipparakudi settlements under the Integrated Tribal Development Project (ITDP). The SSA operates nine of them in as many settlements with negligible student turnout. “Sadly, none of these single-teacher schools has tutors native to the place. While the community has qualified youth with TTC besides 10th and 12th graders, the SSA is cold to the community’s social and educational aspirations,” observes S. Ramachandran, with matrilineal ties with Edamalakudi and a first-year law student at the Government Law College in Ernakulam.
“Outsiders who speak chaste Malayalam fail to cut ice with the tribal children, who speak the Muthuvan dialect. It takes time to establish a line of communication with them,” maintains Sudheesh, of Kozhikode, one of the two permanent teachers of the LP School. Mohandas, the headmaster who hails from Vandiperiyar, blames the drop in student strength on the pathetic school infrastructure, which has just two rooms to conduct classes and for teachers’ stay. “Only eight students joined the first standard last year,” he says, making out a case for its upgrade with residential facility for teachers and students. The remoteness of the place has turned away teachers, with none of the four PSC appointees to the school turning up for the job.
The uninspiring scenario has forced parents to put their children either in one of the Model Residential School (MRS) at Marayur, Munnar or Painavu — where an entrance examination stands in the way of those seeking direct admission to Class 5 — or in a government school with pre-matric hostel stay, if not in an affordable private residential school. Long stay away from home, sparse finances and inability to adapt with the cuisine and weather of the outside world prompt some of them to call off studies midway through. “We are doing our best to find ways to change the scene for good,” assures A.K. Balan, Minister for the Welfare of Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Backward Classes, who is slated to visit the tribal panchayat next month. “If it is possible, set up an MRS within the panchayat, we will look into it, provided we have enough students. We also have plans to set up community study centres for skill development and pre-examination coaching to enhance the employability of qualified students as also to prepare them for entrance/job tests. Services of qualified and competent students will also be utilised, initially on a contract basis, to educate children. We also intend to replicate the Wayanad model of special recruitment to Police, Excise, etc.,” he says.
Remoteness
For the uninitiated, the woes plaguing Edamalakudi stem from the remoteness that the tribe had been tossed into back in the 1950s when the then Chief Minister of Thiru-Kochi Pattam Thanu Pillai evicted them from their place of domicile to make way for the Sengulam dam and chose the Anamudi reserve forest bordering Pettimudi as the rehabilitation site. Consigned to the outback of public memory, they have lived a tough life in the jungles ever since, growing indigenous varieties of food crops over some 35,000 acres of jungle tracts, which have given way to cash crops like cardamom in a big way in the recent past. The panchayat was formed in 2010, but its office continued to function from Devikulam town, some 45 km to the south, until the government ordered the panchayat administration last month to fully relocate to Edamalakudi. If anything, this is expected to add momentum to delivery of services like pensions and nudge the population into taking an interest in registering birth, death and marriage. An Akshaya Centre is already in operation here to deliver online services.
Last month also saw electricity come to two of its key settlements. All these decades, tribespeople going on errands to Munnar would trek through an 18-km forest track to reach Pettimudi, at the foothills of Rajamalai, to make the onward trip to town through the national park. Construction of a motorable road from Pettimudi to Societykudi, located another 4-km into the forests from Edalipparakudi, remains a job half done. Begun in the wake of the special package for Edamalakudi announced in 2012, it resembles a haphazard granite stone pathway, only fit for four-wheel drive vehicles. When tribespeople voiced their grouse about the road remaining a work in progress at a sitting of the State Women’s Commission in the panchayat hall last month, Munnar Forest Range Officer M.S. Suchindranath said all construction activities, including building of some 250 concrete houses for homeless tribespeople, were slowed by restrictions rightly imposed by forest conservation laws.
Infrastructure
A bone of contention between the forest authorities and the panchayat is over the slow progress in physical infrastructure creation in the panchayat owing to the restrictions. “Unless there’s a proper road, how are we expected to ferry material for construction of the much-needed administrative and health infrastructure? And, with the ban on quarrying and the limitations on transport, building material costs a few times more when shipped in instalments from outside,” says panchayat secretary P. Sunil. Precisely why it will take a year or two before the proposed primary health centre (PHC), for which the National Rural Health Mission has earmarked ₹ 1 crore and the panchayat has allocated ₹ 28 lakh, becomes a reality. “The tender has been awarded, but sourcing building material is a tall order, maintains Mr. Sunil.
The folks of Edamalakudi are not in the pink of their health. With their traditional ricegrains, pulses and tubers being replaced over time by PDS and market provision, lifestyle ailments and hypertension have set in. Women and children are undernourished and premature delivery is a common occurrence. Last year alone, four newborns died at birth. The PHC subcentre at Societykudi, manned by two male nurses, with an occasional visit by a doctor, fails to serve any purpose. “A young woman developed complications while in labour and gave birth when being taken to the hospital at Munnar in our vehicle, but then she was referred to the Government Medical College at Kottayam. But sadly, the infant died on the way,” recalls A.M. Fakrudheen, Assistant Sub- Inspector of Police, part of the Tribal Intelligence Wing in the area.
“There was also concern about rising rate of infertility among young couples in the aftermath of rampant misuse of oral contraceptive pills by young women to avoid going to the traditional, but ill-maintained, Valaimapurai — menstrual home, a secluded mud structure on the boundaries of each settlement for women to stay in confinement during the menstruating period and pregnancy. Thanks to awareness programmes, the situation has improved, but the ill effects of unregulated use of such pills are still latent in many women. The Health Department is training nine of its staffers and 21 volunteers from the kudis under its Oorumithram programme to provide urgent medical aid, even conduct labour in the kudis ,” informs V.V. Radha, who retired as block medical officer last month.
