On Sunday, Umesh, a soft-spoken second grader, and a dozen of his classmates clamored to tell a visitor why no children in the village of Raup had returned to their local government school in this remote southeast corner of Uttar Pradesh since March 26.
Amid the competition to be heard, Umesh, 8, turned to a friend and began to demonstrate how, he said, two teacher trainees tethered him and seven of his friends to windows and ceiling fans and beat them. He spread his arms wide and said, “They tied me up and hung me on the window like this.”
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Umesh and his friends in the village of Raup, in Sonbhadra district, are Ghasia, which is seen as either a caste or a tribe, depending on whom you ask. Forced out of their former villages in nearby forests because of overcrowding, the Ghasia have migrated to rocky, unoccupied land in Raup’s periphery over the past two decades, their homes now abutting a dusty national highway.
Umesh’s school was included in a Human Rights Watch report released on Tuesday, titled “They Say We’re Dirty: Denying an Education to India’s Marginalized,” a qualitative study on the type of discrimination that children in the lowest strata of society, like the Ghasia, experience in schools in four states — Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Andhra Pradesh.
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The report cites Unicef’s estimate that 80 million Indian children will drop out before completing elementary school and contends that various forms of discrimination and intimidation contribute significantly to that number.
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At school, they said, the other children called them Ghasia as if it were a curse, and when they tried to play with the Kharwar children, they were chased away and spat on.
In a video attached to the Human Rights Watch report, the principal at the time, Farida Khatun, said that it was better if the Ghasia children stayed away from school.
“They don’t bathe, they don’t wear school uniform, and they smell,” she said. “When we ask them why they are so dirty, they say there is no water. The problems of these children will never get solved. Their parents are uneducated. We can’t mix these children with normal children because they are spoiling them, too.”
Sangeeta Devi, one of the two current teachers in training, said that if the Ghasia children were to return, it would be impossible to handle all 205 students. The school’s trainees, who have received no teacher instruction, are little more than babysitters.
“We can’t take care of these kids if they come here. They only listen to the male teachers,” she said, referring to the two men accused of tying Umesh to a window, his friend Dayalu, also 8, to a ceiling fan, and others’ hands behind their backs.
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Parents in the Ghasia community expressed little other than injured pride. Most parents interviewed in the village said that beating was the only way to raise obedient children.
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Ghasia parents also pointed to their own poverty as a barrier to acceptance at the school. New clothes are an extreme luxury, and many children don’t get them until they reach school-going age. Soap is unaffordable, so sand is used instead. At times, their poverty is so acute that attending school would be a distant-if-present worry. In 2001, during a period of prolonged unemployment in the community, the Ghasia were reduced to eating grass, some of which proved to be mildly poisonous. A total of 18 young Ghasia children died from both starvation and poisoning.
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