Of Government schools and runaway kids
What does a 70-year-old priest who takes care of runaway children at the railway station know about technology? Plenty, as it turns out.
Father Anthony runs Don Bosco's Ashalayam or "House of Hope". It has branches in Madras, Calcutta, New Delhi and Lucknow.
In between two heart surgeries, multiple knee operations and god knows how many stomach and kidney ailments, the man's turned around the lives of hundreds of kids.
We've all seen them - picking up the trash at railway stations. Sniffing glue in the corners when they've got nothing to eat. Beaten up by the cops when they don't cough up hafta. Most of them left home after a quarrel and hopped onto the first train they found.
Hundreds of kilometers and many state borders later, they land up in strange cities. They don't remember their home address, they don't have any money and they can't go back. So they live their lives as best as they can, in the sweat and grime of the railway platform.
Father Anthony befriends them. Not easy, because they trust no one. He takes them to Ashalayam, cleans them up and trains them in vocational skills. Some are able to describe their homes and are ultimately re-united with their parents. The others grow up under Father's care, find jobs, get married and settle down.
Father Anthony's first major brush with technology was around the time the Nithari killings near Delhi were made public. Horrified by the fact that many of the children butchered had been missing for weeks according to police records, he tried to find a solution.
Don Bosco Ashalayam Lucknow and another NGO called ChildLine, tied up with the city administration, to create a constantly updated, online database of lost and found children.
Complete with names, photographs and contact details, it helped parents and cops look up missing kids. Concerned citizens could log on and anonymously report lost kids wandering in their area.
Pretty soon the High Court ordered the initiative to be replicated across Uttar Pradesh. With Don Bosco Ashalayam, as the nodal agency for maintaining the database and infrastructure.
Father's second brush with tech came when he was trying to get his kids educated. Enrolling them in neighborhood government schools wasn't much use, he found. Because practically all the kids at school, simply bunked class. To protect their own wages, teachers would mark the kids present. And then go home themselves.
As an experiment, Father Anthony installed finger print based attendance markers, in ten schools - in Jalesar town of Etah district in UP. The town's got some 36,000 people, almost half of whom live below the poverty line. It's main industry is making "Ghungroos" - those tinkling bells dancers tie to their ankles. And most of the workers are kids.
Since the government offers money to parents whose kids are in school, the townsfolk register their children multiple times - in every school in the vicinity. But since there's no serious attempt to check attendance, they order the kids to turn up at the factory instead.
A word about the attendance machines. They're the same expensive gizmos most of us use, in our fancy city offices. But because Jalesar has never had any steady electricity, Father invested in palm sized devices with rechargeable batteries.
Tragically, the investment flopped. One, because growing children's fingerprints change rapidly as they grow up. And two, many girls wore customary henna on their hands, seriously confusing the machines. Unfazed, Father installed Face and Iris Recognition machines. These seemed to work better. Within three months, attendance in the ten schools improved markedly.
That caught the attention of the Uttar Pradesh Education Board. They helped connect the attendance devices in all the schools to a central sever, via cell phone signals.
Everyday, attendance data would be collated and updated on a website - that could be checked by education officials in Lucknow. Suddenly, they had a way to dramatically improve attendance and teaching efficiency in government schools across the state.
Sounds like a mini fairy tale. Till you realize that a lone priest with no steady source of income begged, borrowed and saved to fund the whole venture. He raised more than a lakh of rupees on his own steam.
Till you're told that the people who first tried to install the attendance machines were physically threatened by Ghungroo factory owners. Who'd make Ghungroos if all the kids were in school?
The teachers didn't like it either. They'd actually have to teach, instead of just collecting pay-cheques from the government. The parents hated the idea - not only would lose money their kid earned at the factory. But also the three hundred rupees from each school they'd got the kid registered in. For a poor family, that worked out to be quite a packet.
So to begin with - no one liked the idea. But last I heard, Nandan Nilenkani's Universal Identity Project had got wind of this story. Readily available bio-metric records of hundreds of school kids in a backward area. And the option of scaling the operation up to schools across Uttar Pradesh. Technology - changing life at the grass roots. Silently.
-Umesh Shanmugam
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