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And Ne'er the Twain Shall Meet?
In India, "MelJol" Shows You How They Do!
By Jerry Pinto
Aditya, 12, is drawing his city on a letter-sized sheet of white paper. He puts in a high-rise building with a sleek car parked in front of it. A school comes next, with an ostentatious, "No Teachers Allowed" sign that immediately makes it clear that the school is run entirely by computers!
Children paint at a MelJol art workshop attended by students from two public and two private schools in April 2000
He adds a theatre and a cyber cafe. He throws in an overpass, and at the edge of the paper where a little white space remains, he places a garage. The people are ensconced in cocoons.
Malti, also 12, is drawing her city on a similar sheet of white paper. At the center is a slum around which she places a hospital, a police station and a fire brigade. She thinks awhile and puts in a building, which she labels "Private School" and another, much smaller building, with "Municipal School" on it. She adds people in plenty.
No prizes for guessing that Malti and Aditya were both drawing the same city. In this case, Mumbai (Bombay), India. No prizes too for guessing that Aditya comes from a background of privilege, while Malti comes from one that is marginalized (see Mort a la difference).
Aditya is not old enough to want to exclude the poor yet. He just does not register them because there is very little in his experiential world that brings him up against the facts of poverty. His stance has not yet coalesced into a not-in-my-backyard attitude.
Malti is not old enough to believe that her position in the world cannot be changed.
Both are still children. Both can still be saved from the lessons their environments have taught them.
A Meeting of Minds – and Worlds
This is the core belief of "MelJol" (an almost untranslatable word that can mean interaction, getting together to know one another, or building a relationship), a non-governmental organization that seeks to crash through the stereotypes, the prejudices and the ignorance that lead to a denial of children's rights.
"The idea of 'MelJol Hum Bachchon Ka' (roughly translated, it means 'We Children Gathering Together') as it
was originally called (the last three words were dropped when it spread to non-Hindi speaking cities like Bangalore where they meant nothing in the local language) was born in the foot-stomping ruckus that a Chacha
Ka Mela (Uncles' Fair) produces," says Jeroo Billimoria, the originator of the program and its president.
Her eyes sparkle as she begins to speak in a mixture of plainspeak and passion: "The Chacha ka Mela is a gathering for street children, an awareness-raising program disguised as a fair. The street children get to eat some good food, watch a film, dance, play games, while simultaneously, NGOs try to raise their awareness of various issues which could range from the evils of tobacco to the prevention of AIDS.
"We asked students from private schools to raise the money for the stalls and also to staff them. And we watched as the interaction brought these two groups together for the first time. It became obvious that there were great possibilities here.
"The idea began as: let's bring these children together for a more meaningful interaction. It grew into: let's bring different kinds of children together, not just street children or children with learning disabilities or with special needs, but every kind of child. The thought expanded to: why restrict this interaction to just children? Why not bring everyone together to engender change?
"The change we sought may have begun with the idea of child's rights, but that is the beginning of what MelJol envisages. A child-friendly world would be a friendlier, more caring world. A world that respects children's rights would be a world that would respect the rights of every vulnerable group."
A MelJol facilitator conducts a session on child rights at a children's art workshop attended by students from two public and two private schools in April 2000
The concept of MelJol was profoundly simple; and like many simple ideas, it drew its power from its sheer simplicity. The vision was based on "twinning": bringing children with different experiential backgrounds together in a planned manner and on an equal footing, so as to ensure mutually beneficial interaction that would be socially useful over the long term.
"We started MelJol to break the barriers in children's brains, to look at building bridges, to find an alternative vision for coexistence," Billimoria said. "It was to show the child from the municipal school that the child from a private school is not a horror. It was to show the private school child that the municipal school child was not dirty and illiterate. But most of all, it was about empowering all these different groups of children to ask for their rights."
In most societies, the idea of children's rights is a paradox that does not admit resolution. A child is dependent. A child is under-age. A child is immature. Ergo, a child does not have rights. Yet, at another level, few civilized societies would argue that some human beings are more equal than others. And children are human beings too.
"The idea of children's rights is anathema to most adults," said Devika Grover, Senior Program Executive for MelJol. "It seems to carry connotations of rebellion, protests and strikes. Therefore, we find it better to approach adults with the idea of the child's responsibilities and then add the correlative of the child's rights.
"So, if we want to talk about how children have the right to a clean environment, we start by talking about what children could do to help the ecological movement, whether by taking part in a Vanamahotsav (a big-time tree festival, which includes tree-planting activities) or cleaning their immediate surroundings."
But beyond its ideological structure, MelJol had to have an actual beginning. It started off as a Field Action Project of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) where Billimoria was a lecturer. It has now been delinked from TISS and is a registered "charitable society."
Learning to Deal With Differences and to Build Upon Commonalties
Thus in December 1991, 1,600 10-to-15-year-olds from Mumbai's municipal and private schools met with each other to begin the process of breaking the barriers of prejudice and negativity by simply meeting with each other and acknowledging the differences as well as the commonalties between them. Over the years, a model emerged that involves seven sessions, each of which lasts 45 minutes to an hour.
The first is a set of twin orientations in both schools during which a facilitator draws out prejudices ("Municipal school children are illiterate because they don't know English"; "Private school children are spoilt brats"), and then deals with them. Facts are offered as replacements for prejudices or ignorance and a sensitization begins.
Next, there is an interaction session held at either school. Here, contact is encouraged in the form of games, cooperative projects, anything that will help both groups recognize the commonalties between them. The next step is an evaluation of the interaction where questions are answered.
Public school children who have undergone drama training in a July 2000 theater workshop present a play
"Often, private school children want to know why those from municipal schools were barefoot or wearing slippers instead of shoes," said Kashmira, a Junior Facilitator. "One of the commonest questions is: why are they so short? That gives you a chance to talk about malnutrition, about social imbalances."
The next session takes place in the other school and a similar evaluation program follows. The last, equally important session incorporates feedback. As Rajeshree Zagade, a coordinator puts it, "The children don't hesitate to speak their minds. If they were bored, they will say so. We learn as we go along."
"We've been learning from our mistakes," agrees Billimoria. "Our growth is really due to the fact that we did not allow ourselves to be limited by the program devised by us. Where we thought an issue would fit into MelJol's scheme of things, we created ways in which it could be made part of the program.
"For instance, when we started the cleanliness campaign, we discovered that much of the litter was in the form of empty gutka (a mixture of tobacco, areca nut and aromatic flavors, plus several other additives) sachets. This made us aware that large numbers of children were eating something that could give them mouth cancer. While schools were severe with children caught smoking, gutka was allowed."
An Idea Takes Wing
MelJol started small but always dreamt big.
For the last nine years, Billimoria has led a small team and taught them to ask, and keep on asking, until they got what they wanted for the children they sought to empower. The team pushed their way into school principals' offices (to gain access to private schools) and into Education Officers' cabins (to get a foot into the municipal schools' doors).
The initial funding came from the Byramjee Foundation. Currently, the donor list has expanded to include UNICEF, The Thelma and JRD Tata Trust, The Bombay Community Public Trust, and the Ambuja Foundation.
"We now have a staff of 18 people," Billimoria said. "There are six administrative staff members and the rest either have a masters degrees in social work or come from child development backgrounds."
Meanwhile, other numbers have been growing too so that, by the end of 1999, approximately 26,000 children were involved in MelJol interactions. The figures for this year have yet to be computed but even at a conservative estimate, they exceed 100,000.
Today, MelJol has a presence in several cities and towns in the country – Mumbai, Bangalore,Thane and Pune. The project now includes issue-based work, with children taking up causes like getting their school a borewell and playgrounds, fighting alcoholism, involving themselves in spreading the ideas of secularism, and of course, fighting gutka consumption.
A child explains the harmful effects of gutka to an adult audience, including Dr. Ram Barot, Deputy Mayor of Mumbai, and other government officials. Some 600 children from 12 public schools participated in a day devoted to creating awareness about gutka, using the media of games, plays, paintings, etc.
The publishing program was launched with source-books, fact sheets and teacher training manuals and has expanded to textbooks too. These are primers on children's rights and are generally used in Value Education classes. Most schools in India have some form of institutionalized value education although this tends to be more religion-based rather than focusing on ethics.
The idea of community-basing these activities led to the setting up of MelJol clubs. The demand came from the children themselves and the clubs are run entirely by them, including decisions on the nature and scope of activities.
"If this means they want to create a campaign against alcoholism and organize a cricket match, that is what they do," said Sumitra Ashtikar, a program coordinator. "Our only mandate as facilitators is to make sure they stay with the goals of MelJol and respect its guiding principle of coexistence and tolerance." The clubs function out of whatever space the children can find.
Facing Prejudices Head-On
But while it is easy to see that such interactions are necessary, you can't help wondering: Does this work? Wouldn't it further undermine an underprivileged child's confidence to see how much she is denied when she visits a well-managed and well-endowed private school? Wouldn't the prejudices of a child from a privileged background be reinforced by some defensive behavior or even by the lack of a common social context?
"It does happen," said Divya Raghunandan, Junior Facilitator from the Bangalore branch of MelJol. "There can be some terrible moments. The private school children are reluctant to make physical contact because the poor in India are stigmatized as dirty; they find it difficult to eat with municipal school children because they worry about the germs that might be passed on to them or because of caste and class prejudices; they are almost afraid of them because they feel the children will be violent. That shows."
In these cases, MelJol works in an extra session to try and counter these feelings by further discussions. But in most cases the interactions have worked well.
"It is important to see this as a learning process for both sets of children," said Varsha Mahabale, Senior Program Executive. "We need to build self-confidence and leadership skills with children from municipal schools. We need to encourage openness and sensitivity with children in private schools."
Changing Things for the Better
"I got my grandfather to stop consuming gutka," said Sandhya Mahindrakar, age 12, a student from a municipal school. "Before MelJol came to our school I didn't even know what gutka was. When I heard how bad it was, I wanted to stop everyone from eating it. The didi ('elder sister,' a term by which most social workers are addressed) told me to start with my family. So I got grandpa to stop having it."
"The benefits of leadership sessions in municipal schools are enormous," said Billimoria. "Another child managed to convince his parents to stop selling gutka even though it brought in a lot of money to their little stall."
Children paint on a school playground
There are other success stories that Sumitra Ashtikar recounts from Thane district: the children from Kunj who started a mini-bank with their savings and helped the needy; the children from Uparale, who built the compound wall for their school, cleaned the well, and motivated drop-outs to come back to school; the children from Lena, who pushed the sarpanch (the head of the village local self-government body) into getting their classroom repaired and plastered and made him put in a borewell for their school.
Clearly, children understand their rights and under the right leadership, know how to get them.
What makes MelJol so revolutionary? Says Billimoria, "Children, people, you, me – we are all potential social revolutionaries who can make a difference, who can effect change. All children need is awareness, a certain amount of facilitation and encouragement and they can do a lot for themselves."
Making Teachers Part of the Strategy
In the second year of its existence, MelJol realized that sensitizing teachers to the concept of children's rights would make a huge difference. "I now believe in children's rights," wrote a teacher from a municipal school. "I think we often speak only of children's responsibilities, we need to make them realize that they have both."
Another teacher, from a private school, confesses: "When we took our children to the municipal school, I told the driver not to park in front of the gate because it would block their school buses. And then it hit me that the school didn't have buses. You walk into the building and you see how little they have and how hard they have to try to educate their students and you feel a sense of your own privilege, a sense of your own greed."
The teachers, Billimoria feels, are the key to the success of MelJol, which is now reinventing its program and concentrating on indirect intervention.
"There is only a limited amount we can do since we meet the children only seven times a year and then move on," she said. "There was no way we could keep reinforcing our message. I feared that like so many other sensitization programs, we would have only a short-term effect. It should have occurred to us earlier that teachers would be far more effective in transmitting the principles of children's rights and that to sensitize them to these issues would have a much greater impact.
"MelJol has not been able to break into the educational system. It was an island for too long. We can only work effectively by networking, by drawing in every aspect of the system into this quest for the rights of the child."
This led to some soul-searching. There was the very real fear that teachers would not be able to act as facilitators for the program but even though indirect intervention is only a few months old, Billimoria sees the difference. "The teachers have proved to be an immense resource," she said.
Further steps involve crystallizing the project and then taking it across to the state governments to incorporate it into the curriculum. In India, education is a state subject on which the state governments legislate. The Constitution differentiates between the powers enjoyed by the state and central governments as well as their areas of jurisdiction.
Ask Billimoria what MelJol needs and she says candidly, "Money. MelJol needs money to run the program. It needs money to expand the program. It needs money for the resource center we have planned. It needs money for new projects. It needs money to take this way of thinking to every child in the country, to every adult in the country."
But shouldn't it be easy to fundraise for this? Billimoria shrugs expressively. "It's an elitist project. That's what people tell me."
The easy and emotive argument is that there are much more serious problems that children face which need more immediate attention. In effect, the standard critique of MelJol runs like this: When there are child victims of the flesh trade and child laborers, sexually abused children and AIDS-affected and AIDS-infected children, why bother about a twinning program that seeks to bring together children from different experiential backgrounds?
The argument is myopic. It does not recognize that at the base of all these terrible abuses of childhood – and they are indeed terrible – there is a common link. The link is the refusal to accede that children have the same rights as adults and that society owes it to them to restore these rights, keeping in mind their special needs as well. An empowered child and a sensitive society is a better guarantee of the rights of the child, a better guarantee against abuse than legislation or the setting up of another shelter.
And when Aditya accedes Malti a place in his city, when he sees her as the result of skewed social values rather than as an aberration, you know the first hesitant steps toward that goal are being taken.
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Mort a la difference
There is a certain hierarchy to Indian schools. Both Aditya and Malti (see main story) go to school.
But they might just as well live on different planets.
The differences begin in their lives. Aditya is a middle-class child who eats four full meals a day, (More, if his mother has anything to do with it.) Malti considers herself blessed if she has three meals a day.
Aditya goes to school by bus. Malti walks. The school isn't far but she has to cross three busy roads to school.
Aditya's school has a laboratory, a library, a small playground and a computer room. Malti's school has no library, no playground, no computers, not even a telephone. The laboratory exists in name only.
Yes, Aditya is going to school.
Yes, Malti is also going to school.
There is a certain hierarchy in India's educational system that makes statistics completely unreliable. In the cities, the municipal school is at the bottom of the heap. It is run by the municipal corporation of the city or town and is free. It caters to the lower middle-class and the poor. No one who can get their child into a different kind of school would put their children into a municipal school.
Next in the hierarchy – and way above the municipal school – are the state-aided schools. These are generally run by religious associations and are subsidized by the state governments. (In India, education is on the list of subjects on which the state government is empowered to make laws; the central government is not.) They would run to some amenities, their children would be drawn from the middle and professional classes.
At the top of the heap are the private schools, many of which were set up during the British Raj. They are largely autonomous bodies, raising their own funds through fees and donations, and paying their teachers out of this. These are the schools for children of the rich and the successful. They are schools where many senior school children carry mobile phones and travel abroad every year with or without their parents.
These dichotomies do not exist in rural India. Most of rural India has only two kinds of schools: dysfunctional schools where teachers show up once a month and imaginary schools which actually do not exist and have been invented to pad the figures bureaucrats must submit to the government.
Malti is lucky. She was born in a city. Malti is doubly lucky. As a girl, she might not have been put into school at all.
But that, in itself, is clearly not good enough.
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