Learning lessons in Rajasthan

Five kilometres beyond the last ramshackle village in a remote rural area of Rajasthan, up a rough track through a dry thorn-bush-filled valley and a green oasis of trees, flowers and low buildings appear. At the entrance, on a large sign, incongruous in this inaccessible place, is the familiar circle of golden EU stars on blue background.

This is Manas Ganga girls’ school - an innovative boarding school for girls from the most marginalised communities in this part of eastern Rajasthan, where female literacy rates drop as low as 8%. The tourist palaces of Jaipur are a bumpy three- hour ride away.

European Commission development aid has been contributing to both rural and urban education programmes here, including this school, since 1999. The Commission has provided funds of about €11 million, through the Aga Khan Foundation - which then added its own funds (around €4m) - to work with four Indian non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in different states on building sustainable and model education projects with the most disadvantaged children.

In Rajasthan, the partner NGO is Jaipur-based Bodh Shiksha Samiti, in action here for 20 years. Through slow painstaking work with the local communities in poor rural villages and urban slum areas, Bodh aims first to persuade parents, often illiterate and marginalised, of the value of education to their children and then to encourage the communities to take responsibility and pride in the schools by contributing some resources, however meagre, and by continuous almost daily interaction between teachers and parents.

As one Bodh staff member says: "A few years back it was almost taboo to talk on girls’ education in these remote areas, yet now there is a continued demand for more schools." The Bodh approach is to provide high quality - "not just minimum" - and child-centred education for these children who all come from poor disadvantaged groups including low castes, Muslims, migrants and girls. Support from local communities is vital for ensuring not only attendance but long-term sustainability.

At Manas Ganga, the happy chatter of girls’ voices can be heard from dawn to dusk in the still country air. Noise and chat are encouraged in the classrooms, drama, music and art are seen as central to child development and the girls also learn practically in the site’s lush vegetable gardens and small farm. Outings are organised too in the yellow school bus, also with an EU circle of stars on its side, or even by train - a first for most. Some girls have an exam the next day and can be seen scattered round the campus grounds doing last-minute revision. Others gather round me, bright and curious, explaining how school is fun and the facilities so good.

Bodh believes that the girls take much of what they learn - such as simple health lessons - back to their homes, but the school is also a resource centre for teacher-training and other courses including for those from outside the state. Bodh aims to contribute to the often struggling government system, sending its teachers to local schools, or setting up local schools and then encouraging the government to take them over.

In the nearby village of Govdi, where camels and bullocks wander in the rough lanes, a two-room under-attended village school has been renovated and developed by Bodh working with the villagers, so that now there are eight classrooms and 200 children with 100% attendance up to age 14. At the local tea stall, a group of village men explain that their vision is for it to go all the way to undergraduate level. "It’s not safe for our girls to travel to town," says one older man in a checked turban.

Back in Jaipur, on the rough sandy street of a small slum area, a makeshift school class is under way, the children sitting and studying on rugs and mats. Their gentle grey-haired teacher looks calm and authoritative despite the setting. To one side a small building that will soon house the school is under construction. But in an Indian catch-22, since this is an illegal slum area, despite having funds for such deprived areas, the government cannot authorise another illegal building. Bodh gets round this by building a temporary structure and then mobilising the community to ensure neither the local government nor the police demolishes it.

Nearby, the Amargarh Resource school, in another slum, shows how from such unpromising beginnings real progress can be made. In just over a decade, the Amargarh school has gone from a tent on a garbage dump to a two-storey building, full of bubbling children from pre-school to 14-year olds. In one class, a group of migrant workers’ children who have never been near a school in their lives, are doing colouring to learn simple hand-eye co-ordination and behavioural skills before moving on after a few months to more focused teaching.

Bodh’s optimism and energy is unbounded. New plans include reaching out to children working in 50 brick kilns around Jaipur. They have signed an ambitious agreement with the government of Rajasthan to extend their work in the next three to four years from the 45,000 odd they reach so far in rural and urban areas to 324 deprived and slum areas of Jaipur, covering up to 300,000 children.

Although direct EU funding is coming to an end on the programme this summer, the Aga Khan Foundation will remain involved here. And Bodh is bidding for EU education funds that are now, in an effort to co-ordinate donor aid more effectively, all routed through the national Indian education ministry.

While both Bodh and the Commission will do their own impact assessments of the value of this seven-year programme, the blooming oasis of the Manas Ganga girls’ school tells its own success story.

• Kirsty Hughes is a freelance journalist based in London.

Five kilometres beyond the last ramshackle village in a remote rural area of Rajasthan, up a rough track through a dry thorn-bush-filled valley and a green oasis of trees, flowers and low buildings appear. At the entrance, on a large sign, incongruous in this inaccessible place, is the familiar circle of golden EU stars on blue background.