RAPAR (India): Away in the remote Nilpar hamlet, in the Rapar area of quake-ravaged Gujarat, 25 children sit on the bare mud under the winter sun, with their teacher and a small portable blackboard. Behind them is a quake-resistant, semi-permanent shelter. Its walls are made of bricks followed by bamboo and a roof of bamboo. A kilometre across is a pile of rubble of what was once their humble primary school. The bare shelter serves as both the day school and home for orphans who have nowhere to go.

“I live this in this school. I have nowhere to go and my family is gone. At least I have company here — otherwise I am so frightened of being alone,” says seven-year-old Kantibhai, a quake orphan. “We get food, and there is a place to sleep,” adds Dilip, 10.

Living with them are the children of parents who have migrated out in search of work and have left their children in the common care of the village.

The state’s primary school education is in shambles, literally buried beneath the quake’s debris. What semblance of a school has resurfaced in Nilpar, for example, is thanks to the voluntary efforts of non-government organisation based in the state capital of Ahmedabad and a local institute committed to Mahatma Gandhi’s ideals.

Gujarat’s Department of Primary Education, under the state education department, has funds of $640,000 for the repair and rehabilitation of schools. The Dutch government is funding 85 per cent of this cost. In a recent statement, the department said it was repairing 9,483 schools in 18 districts with 44,819 classrooms.

But remote villages like Nilpar tell a different story. Here it is the Ahmedabad-based NGO, Society for Research and Initiatives in Sustainable Technologies and Institutions (SRISTI), and a local Gandhian institute Gram Swaraj Sangh (GSS) that have jointly undertaken the task of getting primary education back on rails.

It is building semi-permanent shelters in 10 villages in Rapar to serve as both day and residential schools. The students include both orphans and children of migrant workers, who took a bold decision of leaving their children behind and having them learn from a temporary teacher in the meantime.

Their decision followed counselling by SRISTI and GSS, who have recruited a local youth who has passed tenth class as an ad-hoc teacher to teach the odd medley of children some basics of primary education.

Students of what was once Anjar town’s only English-medium school now study in a temporary quake-resistant shelter made of prefabricated bricks and mud. The principal wonders how long he is expected to run a class in the shelter. While the government claims it has rebuilt most of the damaged schools, NGOs in Bhachau point out that what exists in the name of rebuilt schools are tents and shelters. —Dawn/InterPress Service.