Community led- action for enrollment of dropout children

[Ujana kumari Minj]

Hi everyone ! This is Ujana Minj, Rati Lama and Pancham Minj from Rural Aid NGO work with support from Global Fund for Children is in Alipurduar District, Kalchini block (State of West Bengal, India). We work in the tea gardens on the issue of trafficking and child labour. Blog written & supported by Dheeraj Lepcha.      

Community sustainability and ownership is one of the dreams of Rural Aid and we have started working on it with the approach of SALTs method. To lead a community sustainable and ownership we have chosen three tea gardens as a model of sustainability community. Therefore, out of three teagarden Dima teagarden is one of them. After the approach many Salt visits and we prepared the community for common dream building in Dima tea garden.  

In community common dream building, there is also a dream of community which states that “All children must go to school“.

To fulfil one of  the action dreams, the ICDS workers and adolescent children members of Dima tea garden have initiated a home visit and list out 5 the names of dropout children. During the home visits, they have found that those 5 children who are dropouts were living in the very poor economic condition of their family, some of them have no parents, even though they have parents some children are in vulnerable condition and also most of children they don’t have birth certificate documents because of these they were dropout from the school since in age of 3-4 years. While conversing with the children, they have stated that they were interested to study but due to lack of support they have to drop out. Then the adolescent children and community met with the school teacher and SI (School Inspector) for the issue of birth certificate, the SI suggested a birth declaration from the panchayat and later the community also visited the panchayat and received the birth declaration as a result the in the month of June 2023, children were enrolled in school. They enrolled in school according to their age, which were 10th, 12th and 13th years old. 

At present, those 5 dropout children are continuing their school with the guidance from the community and also they have enrolled in Rural Aid’s remedial tuition center at Dima tea garden.

This was the small action led by the community and adolescent children for their common dream. 

[Dr. E. Mohamed Rafique]

Your action to achieve the community dream brings to mind these two lines of a poem from my school days:
"Little drops of water, little grains of sand,
Make the mighty ocean and the pleasant land...

And I have adapted two more lines from the same poem for you, as:
So, these little dreams, humble and so attainable,
Make our villages, much more sustainable ⌛

Always indebted for the learning from you, and may many more villages follow your model, and join your way!