From farms and factories to schools
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COMMENTS 
M V Foundation has helped 100,000 child labourers go to school in Andhra Pradesh
Schooling for child labourers is a dream. Their childhood is spent slogging out in fields or factories, wayside eateries earning a living.
But child labourers numbering more than 100,000 from some 500 villages of Ranga Reddy district of Andhra Pradesh have an altogether different tale to narrate. These children have been withdrawn from work to attend a full-time formal school, and playing a major role in the education of these children is the M Venkatarangaiya Foundation (MVF), a Hyderabad-based voluntary agency.
The Foundation works in the rural areas of Ranga Reddy district, a district characterised by low levels of literacy and a socially and economically backward population.
M V Foundation's believes that every child out of school is a working child, thus giving no space to a distinction between one form of child labour and another. Thus the foundation defines all non-school-going children between 5-14 years as child labour. It focuses on ensuring that all children attend schools and don't end up working.
The foundation helps children go to regular, formal schools. This is done by helping children below nine to gain admission in schools. Older children between 9-14 years are put through a bridge course. This course makes use of what the children already know and enables them to catch up with regular schoolchildren of their age. Between 1996-99, such bridge course camps saw nearly 25,000 children enabled/suitably equipped to attend formal schooling.
Many of these children worked as bonded labourers, shepherds or agricultural or domestic labour.
The Foundation's work doesn't end with admitting the children to a formal school. To ensure that there is minimal drop-out, the foundation's volunteer workers regularly monitor and follow-up kids admitted to a formal school.
Local community participation has strengthened MVF programmes. Apart from the parents, whom the foundation motivates to send their children to a formal school to advance the child's prospects, the children themselves, elected representatives and government school teachers participate actively - right from sustaining the motivation of the parents to providing financial assistance for school infrastructure and even salaries for additional teachers.
MVF's area of operation when inaugurated in 1991 was just three villages. Today it spans 500 villages. Around 85 villages have been made totally child labour-free and in more than 400 villages all children below the age of 11 years are attending formal schools.
A strong gender component in the MVF programme has ensured that nearly 5000 adolescent girls have been able to attend local government schools.
Through the efforts of the foundation, nearly 4,000 labourers have been released from bonded labour.
The MVF experiment, with its emphasis on the bridge courses, has inspired the state government of Andhra Pradesh to organise several mainstreaming programmes for child labourers such as the back-to-school programmes.
The MVF model has also prompted states like Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Orissa, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and the cities of Mumbai and Kolkata to arrange similar programmes.
At the community level not only is there growing unacceptability of the 'child worker', but people have begun to realise the disadvantages of denying a child an education. They see the withdrawal of a child from work as a necessary step to enrolling him/her in a formal school.
Community pressure has ensured that employers think twice before employing a child. In some cases the pressure has resulted in employers voluntarily sending children working with them to schools or the bridge courses.
To top it all, cropping patterns in the district have changed. Floriculture which greatly depends on children for flower-picking, is no longer popular.
Parents whose wards are attending school as a result of the MVF intervention, make enormous sacrifices to ensure that the child continues and finishes his/her schooling. Many have redistributed the work previously done by the child among other adult members of the family. It's a sharp contrast to the long-held conventional wisdom that a child's income is essential to sustain a poor family's meagre income!
Contact: M Venkatarangaiya Foundation
28, Maredpally West
Secunderabad - 500 026
Andhra Pradesh, India
Tel: 091-040-7801320
Fax: 091 040 7808808
Email
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