By Manisha Gupta

The "dream school" in Basroor, a tribal farming village, stands between dense woods and swamps where mighty leeches hide. Every night, students trudge to the one-room center to plow through lessons. Under kerosene lamps, classes begin at 8 p.m. and can run for two hours. But on a hard rainy night, children can walk in late without fear of rebuke or beatings, a common occurrence in government schools. "Teachers don't bark or bite," says Huligamma, a 13-year-old girl who works all day before coming to class.

It's a late-night habit that parents are not complaining about, and this school is packed at all times, even during harvests. "It's not like a regular government school," explains the volunteer teacher, who is just 16. "This school listens to working children. It's run by us."

Here in Karnataka, a South Indian state on the Arabian Sea, Damodaran Acharya – everyone calls him Damu – has seized on this logic to make education relevant for children whose families' poverty drives them into the workforce, or who have drifted into vagrancy. He is getting schools to listen to them. "Children are their best first line of defense," Damu says.

So he has organized over 13,000 working children in Bhima Sangha (Working Children's Union), Makkalla Panchayat (Working Children's government) and Namma Sabha (Young Adults' Artisan Guilds) to participate in the politics and processes that affect their lives. As the children press for recognition, village governments are listening closely.

The result: The "dream school" – or "extension school," as they are usually called – in Basroor, just one of the 53 spread over 80 villages that working children have demanded for themselves from their Gram Panchayats (village governments). Their rationale is simple: working children have always valued education; schools, typically, have not valued the working children.

The solution then, has been to create centers that are owned by children, recognized by the government and valued by local economies. The panchayat and sometimes even individual villagers donate a small plot of land and building materials, then the children help build the school and manage the administration in lieu of paying fees. Most important, the official educational system recognizes extension school graduates as equal to their peers from formal schools.

Educators Listening to the Children

The premise has worked well, and the extension schools literally cast the education net wider to catch kids who have dropped out of formal schools to work. Children have designed the model and its workings from the beginning. In April 1995, for example, Damu's rural program organized a workshop on "appropriate" education. The group included elementary school teachers, social workers and government officials and – crucially – 50 working children from rural areas. The children were from different castes and tribes – some had never been to school and many had dropped out. At the workshop, the children were able to offer their ideas about what sort of education they would find relevant.

Every extension school is driven by its clientele – working children whose life patterns run counter to the routine of a regular school – and the schools have brought education back into the lives of nearly 5,000 children.

What works at extension schools that does not work in mainstream schools? There are many factors. The evening sessions do not interfere with the children's work responsibilities. Students share management duties and help chose their teachers. The pedagogy is more appropriate, based as it is on Montessori methods. But mainly children learn how to take charge of their own lives.

Led by Amukta Mahapatra, Damu and a team of education experts put aside traditional pedagogy and designed styles that would allow children to learn independently. "We adapted Montessori methods to rural needs," Damu says, "produced low-cost kits and trained teachers. Where children took two years to learn the alphabets, the new pedagogy of extension schools equipped them to read newspapers in three months."

Children Listening to Their Parents

Nineteen years ago, when Damu set up his organization, The Concerned for Working Children (CWC), "the laws of the country, at best, acknowledged street children," he notes. "Working children were invisible." Damu was then active in the Bangalore Working Union, an attempt to organize the informal labor force of the city.

"The children of our members would come to our meetings and listen to us as we spoke of workers' rights and demands," he said. "Because children worked alongside their parents, many grew up within this unionizing process. Slowly, they began asking questions about themselves. What about our rights? We work, too. These questions had not been asked before. But it seemed the right time to look for answers."

Karnataka, on a conservative estimate, has more than 300,000 working children. The numbers grow every year, with aggressive industrialization in rural belts and the flow of children into cities to seek jobs in hotels, restaurants and small-scale industries.

"You can see children working everywhere," Damu says, "yet when we began talking about them, the trade union movement reminded us that several matters remained unresolved for adult workers, so why deflect the focus by talking about children?"

But the children, by now sensitized by their parents' union activism, did not let the matter lie. "They said, 'If the law does not recognize us, we should change the law'." Damu realized the need for a separate organization, and in 1980 he set up The Concerned for Working Children with two allies, Nandana Reddy and Lakshapati.

The first milestone was also a painful lesson. In 1985 CWC organized more than 300 young workers in Bangalore, the state capital, to assess their working environments, articulate their demands and present a "Children's Bill" to the national labor Ministry. In 1986 the Indian Parliament passed the bill.

But the new law was inadequate; though it established child labor in the roster of national concerns and excited the national media, it ignored any real solutions. Even as CWC continued to build strong children's unions in urban centers, Damu realized that work had to begin earlier – from the point when a child decides to quit school and join the labor force.

Why Children Work

In 1989 CWC launched Ankur (Tender Sapling), a rural program that sought to understand why children migrate to the cities and organize them to take control of their own lives, and Damu retraced his steps to Kundapur, on the Karnataka coast in South Kannara. This is his home ground, and here, despite a 70 percent literacy rate, more than 200,000 children drop out of school every year. Though poverty is not as stark as in the dry plains of the North, children would rather work than go to school.

Damu had a personal perspective on the problems. The son of a village Hindu priest, he had felt the pressure of studying in a village school. He could not afford higher education in Kundapur and had migrated to Bangalore to settle into a clerical job in a publishing house.

"Everything I did brought disappointment," Damu recalls. "My employees harassed me in every way. Life was hard. I woke at three in the morning every day to walk several kilometers to work. These were typical frustrations of migrant youth. So going back to Kundapur brought all this back." One of his earliest insights was somewhat startling: that economics alone does not interfere with children's education.

"In our country, economic poverty locks in firmly with social poverty, political poverty and environmental poverty and drives children out of schools," Damu explains. "The education system is driven by class and caste biases, and does not equip children to respond to other forms of poverty that play out in their lives. Schools defeat their own purpose. Reading and writing do not help when entire forest-based livelihoods get wiped away, or when teachers harass students for their lower-caste allegiances."

"Given such a situation, a child's decision to work for the family rather than go to school is the most appropriate choice he can make," Damu continues. "This is why 10-year-old girls would prefer to walk 35 kilometers to fetch fuel rather than walk to school: The first option made them independent and gave them bargaining power in families; the second cloistered them between classroom walls. Similarly, work in hotels empowered a working child with trade skills; classroom education taught them about the distant Himalayas."

This analysis resonates with the children. Huddled in a building donated by the village council in Holagundi, more that 20 working children talk about the choices they have made for themselves. "I joined the Bhima Sangha because I wanted to study, understand my life as a worker, and learn enough to manage myself independently," says Bassama, the president of the village children's council. "The government school is expensive and teachers beat us severely. It gave me nothing. I quit that school to work as a coolie [agricultural laborer]. My vision is that all children in my district should be freed from work and should all come to our extension schools."

Shammokha, who is 10, has similar insights. Every day he grazes more than 100 sheep from early morning to late night. Two years ago he dropped out of a government school because of his long hours of work, and then he was teased mercilessly by his non-working friends, and even by some teachers.

"Though my father tells me got to sleep after dinner, I go to the extension school because I can study no where else," he says. Shamokkha wants to marry an educated girl when he grows up.

The Need for Political Action

The politics and biases that drive education force children off school registers in India. In their book, "Indian Development," economists Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze write, "It is totally remarkable that in rural India in the age group 12-14 years, more than a quarter of the boys have never been enrolled in schools and more than half the girls have never been enrolled either. The educational disparities both reflect and help to sustain social disparities, and for a real break, much more determined political action would be needed than has been provided so far by either those in office, or by the parties that have led the opposition."

Damu seems to have the solution: He lets young workers loose on political leaders, to make the politicians accountable to the children. Since local governments are the main conduits of funds and development decisions, the children's focus is there.

In every village working children, actively backed by CWC, first organize in their own union, the Bhima Sangha, and elect a children's government, a Makkalla Panchayat. The next step is the construction of a Toofan (Whirlwind) Task Force – a contingent of adults and children who survey their village, identify critical development concerns and implement solutions. Bureaucrats, elected political representatives and all village adults who matter are invited to be in the Toofan Task Force. After further study, recommendations are presented to the village leader.

Hegde adds, "I have always been one with the Damu and the Toofan program: that children are the best decision-makers for themselves."

Tailoring the Program to the Needs

Though some village leaders have become allies, this did not come easily. "Balakrishna Hegde has come a long way," Damu smiles. "In 1989, when I first met him to introduce the program, he had literally kicked out the children from his office. But we persevered cautiously and he was won over."

Each district is different, and each school must develop its own focus appropriate to the life skills needed by its children. But when governments become responsible, children stay in school. Some illustrations:

• The Balkpur Panchayat, with a population of 500 households, has eliminated child labor because employers and parents see the economic value of letting children stay in school, and the village has developed cooperatives in vermiculture, dairy production and the manufacture of umbrellas.

• For the first time in the country, an education department, Karnataka's, has allowed children trained in extension schools to take official examinations for any grade, irrespective of age.

• Local councils in five districts in Karnataka are allocating funds to promote economic incentives and credit cooperatives for parents of working children.

• Many government schools have adopted the Montessori-based pedagogy of extension schools and are grafting CWC's "empowerment material" into the syllabus. Dropout numbers have fallen as a result.

• The state government has approved vocational training courses designed by CWC and taught at Namma Bhoomi (Our Land), a residential school in Kundapur village. Every year more than 100 boys and girls from across the state train for a diploma in appropriate trades.

All these examples, however, are local. Damu's goal is statewide expansion of CWC's strategies. "We cannot do the government's job," he says. "We can only put good, demonstrated strategies in their hands. Our model has tested well in the plains, mountains and coasts of Karnataka. We now want the government to upscale it."

Simultaneously, CWC has trained more than 50 NGOs in the mechanics of teaching children to take charge of their lives. International organizations like Plan International and Save the Children Fund have committed to expanding Damu's program.

Of the many challenges, ironically, the sharpest have come from other children's rights movements. The debate on working children in India has swung from bans on child labor, to embargoes on products of child labor, to ratification of the international convention on young workers, but all are informed completely by adult perspectives. Band-aids, Damu calls them.

"We have to turn around and respond in ways that will reform entire contexts that pressure children to work," he said. "The turning points will have to be determined by children. Bans negate working children, but don't stop children from working. Even today, child protagonist as a concept threatens adults."

But, they are coming around, as working children step on the gas to get more adults to listen!