St. Paul School in Jharkhand's Takra villageOutlook Photos /Asghar Khan St. Paul School in Jharkhand's Takra villageOutlook Photos /Asghar Khan

Nine-year-old Jyoti Kachhap has to walk six kilometers to reach her school. She covers a total of 12 kilometers every day, taking an hour and a half to complete the walk to and from her government school.

“We walk to Siladun School. Sometimes, we fail to attend classes if it rains. We have no choice but to walk such a long distance every day, as there is no school in the village after grade five. If you build one, we will go to school every day,” Jyoti, who studies in grade six, expressed both a plea and sarcasm in her words. When asked what she wanted to become after studying, she said that she would stop studying after grade 12, because her brother, Abhishek Kachhap (17), also dropped out after class 10.

Almost every home in Jyoti's village has school dropouts. However, mentioning Jyoti and her brother is important because they are children of a teacher.

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Takra, the village where Jyoti lives, is located just 35 kilometers from Jharkhand's capital, Ranchi, and is the birthplace of legendary tribal leader Jaipal Singh Munda, popularly known as Marang Gomke (the supreme leader). Munda received his early education at the St. Paul Primary School in Takra. Jyoti is the daughter of Mahanand Junul Kachhap, the principal of St. Paul School.

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Mahanand Junul Kachhap said, “The biggest problem here is the school. We submitted a petition with signatures from all the village elders to Arjun Munda (Union Minister), Kalicharan Munda (MP from Khunti) and Nilkanth Munda (former minister, Jharkhand government), asking for the school to be upgraded to grade 10, but there has been no progress so far. If there was a high school named after Jaipal Singh, children would not have to walk such a long distance.”

The school where Jaipal Singh Munda studied, St. Paul School, allegedly does not receive any funds from the government for maintenance. The walls of the school have become dilapidated. Principal Mahanand Junul Kachhap alleged that the government did not provide any funds even for basic maintenance like painting.

Children often drop out after completing class five or ten. According to him, the main reason behind the high dropout rate is the absence of a high school in the village.

Children in Jharkhand's Takra village Photo: Credit: Asghar Khan Children in Jharkhand's Takra village Photo: Credit: Asghar Khan

Twenty-two-year-old Budhra Munda said that after studying until class five in Takra, he enrolled in a school in Dungidara (another village) for class ten. However, the daily five-kilometer walk became too difficult, so he had to drop out after class nine. He mentioned that if there had been a school offering classes up to 10 and 12 in the village, he would have continued his studies and attending school while also helping his parents at home.

Similarly, village residents like Man Singh Munda (14), Anil Singh Munda (13), and Raj Kachhap (14) dropped out after class five. They express their desire to continue their studies, but due to the lack of a school, they had no choice but to quit.

John Kachhap, the village head and a descendant of Jaipal Singh Munda, said that children who had dropped out because there was no school could be found in every home in the village.

He said that Takra village was adopted by Arjun Munda under the Adarsh Gram Yojana (model village scheme) when he was a Union Minister. “This is Jaipal Singh Munda’s village; it is supposed to be an ideal village. But what kind of adarsh village is it where there is not even a school up to class 10 for its children?”

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Jaipal Singh Munda was India’s first tribal student to study abroad. He studied at the University of Oxford in England from 1922 to 1929. With an aim to send students abroad for higher education, the Jharkhand government launched the Pardeshi Scholarship Scheme on December 29, 2020.

Over the last four years, dozens of students have been sent to foreign universities at the government’s expense, totalling crores of rupees. However, a century later, no one knows how the children in Jaipal Singh Munda's village, Takra, are studying, if at all.

All the political parties in Jharkhand that have used Jaipal Singh Munda’s name for their politics have been in power, yet they have failed to establish even a high school in his village. Moreover, Takra village is still excluded from the current Jharkhand government’s plan to open 500 CM Schools of Excellence over the last five years. So far, 80 CM Schools of Excellence have been opened. Through these schools, the government aims to provide poor students with English-medium education affiliated with the CBSE board.

Chief Minister Hemant Soren is scheduled to visit Takra on January 3 on the occasion of Jaipal Singh Munda’s birth anniversary. This will be the first time that any chief minister will visit the legendry leader's village. The residents say they will urge the chief minister to establish a high school in the village in the name of Jaipal Singh Munda.

There have always been questions about government schools and education in Jharkhand. Over the past five years, the government has merged 4,000 schools. Dropout rates have also been a persistent challenge. According to the Jharkhand Education Project’s 2020-21 survey, there are 621,703 children aged 6-14 in the state.

Despite various efforts by the government to enroll them, only 67,562 children have been enrolled. The remaining 55lvbet,414 children are considered dropouts.