Bhubaneswar: These 20-odd children of mostly daily-wage labourers in a village in Jagatsinghpur district were struggling academically despite being enrolled in school. With no help from parents, who themselves had little educational background, at home, they didn’t even have access to private tuitions. Poverty was not the only reason, but their caste was.In the village, caste barriers remain deeply embedded despite being largely invisible. The hapless children were denied any academic guidance just because they came from Scheduled Castes (SC) community.This is when a retired schoolteacher and his son, also a teacher, stepped in. Gouranga Parida and his son Guruprasad are quietly rewriting the social script.
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The father-son duo have been providing free education to the children from SC families, helping them stay in school and break the cycle of exclusion.While Gouranga has retired as a govt school teacher, Guruprasad is a postgraduate teacher at a higher secondary school in Erasama. After retiring from Saraswati Sishu Mandir in Jagatsinghpur, where he taught for more than four decades, Gouranga returned to the family’s ancestral village in Naugaon, where the father-son noticed that many children from the SC community were struggling academically. “Although the children attended school regularly, many could neither read nor write properly or even complete their class assignments. We were shocked to find that a Class VI student could not even spell ‘apple’. Their learning levels were far below what was expected for their age and grade. The shortage of teachers in the local school has only widened these learning gaps,” Guruprasad said.The family soon realised that the problem extended beyond poverty. Social exclusion had also deprived many of the children of private tuition. “While children from other communities can easily attend tuition classes, they are often left out because of the lingering sense of untouchability,” Gouranga said.Determined to change the situation, the duo began teaching the children free of cost. The village has two SC colonies. Every evening, Gouranga visits one of the colonies, where he teaches seven children at a resident’s house. At the same time, 15 to 20 students from the other colony gather at the Parida family’s ancestral home, where Guruprasad conducts classes. The students, mostly from Classes VI to X, spend three to four hours every evening.Their work soon revealed another challenge. Some of the children had developed a habit of abusing cough syrup and other intoxicants. “It took time and patience, but through regular classes, counselling and constant engagement, we were able to bring them back to their studies and gradually wean them away from addiction,” said Guruprasad, who is an alumnus of Ravenshaw University in Cuttack.The Parida family has also transformed a spacious room in their ancestral home into a learning centre where the children are free to study at any time of the day. “The atmosphere in many of their homes is not conducive to studies,” Guruprasad said.
