The phobia towards basic education

When I first moved to Gurgaon a few months back, I was shocked to see that all the house help were Bengali immigrants. In due course I realized that they were not only Bengali but also Bangladeshi immigrants.  It is real sad that most of these people are pushed out of their comfort zones into other cities to look for jobs. I wonder if the Government in Bengal even knows the number of immigrants living here. Anyway, this post isn’t about the immigrants. It is about the general mind set of the underprivileged in India.

The first person who came to work in my house brought her fifteen year old daughter with her. The girl had never been to school and had been doing house work at various houses for over five years. I offered to teach her to read and write Hindi. She was very excited the first day. She sat with me for over twenty minutes and learnt the first few alphabets. We continued the same way for the next few days. On the fourth day she refused to learn anything. She told me her mother felt it was a waste of time and she’d rather spend the time working someplace else. I tried convincing her that she ought to at least know the basics and it would help her. But she was adamant. She had no interest in educating herself while her mother was only concerned about the amount of money that she could contribute towards running their household.

A quick walk around my apartment complex shows that the place is full of migrants and none of them show any inclination towards even basic education. When half the country is steeped in poverty and basic food is such an issue, education, especially for the girl child is the last thing that most people are concerned with.

Anyway, I started writing this post because of a happy event that happened this morning.

There is a lot of construction work happening around my parent’s house in Bangalore. As expected, along with construction workers are a lot of young children. This morning, my mother took a bunch of these children and admitted them at the local government school. She got their photos taken and then got them enrolled at the school. I hope these kids start enjoying their school and  get some education at least till their parents finish their current construction work and move on to other places.