Patna, 27 JULY: What can Re 1 get you today? Well someone had their thinking cap on in Bihar. The Nitish Kumar government believes that Re 1 coins can lure lakhs of out-of-schools Dalit children to the classrooms and compel them to study!
This may not go down easy with the rational minded, but the ruling NDA government has unveiled a plan in the state under which the children of Dalit community attending school will be given Re 1 daily in cash as “pocket money”. The government says the cash incentive will encourage the out-of-school children to study. Dalits account for 15 per cent of Bihar’s population of 83 million. Of them around 1.50 lakh children are currently out of schools.
“This is a token amount which, at best, can buy one or two toffees but will work wonders for luring them to the classrooms. It will also prompt their parents to send their wards to schools,” the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe Welfare minister in the NDA government Mr Jitan Ram Manjhi told The Statesman today. “And, once their interest in education gets aroused, they will continue their study further which indeed will change their social-economic status”, the minister added.
According to an official report, the number of out-of-school children in Bihar, at presently, is around 10 lakh. Of them, 1.50 lakh children belong to the Dalit community. Many of them are yet to see a classroom. The state government claims to have enrolled 15 lakh children to schools in the last three years of its tenure but arranging cent per cent enrolment in schools still remains a far cry.
The economic condition of Dalits is so bad in Bihar that they send their kids off to work as servants, plate cleaners in hotels or at best engage them to catch rats to earn a livelihood. In several cases, the entire Dalit family members have been engaged in catching rats to quell the pangs of hunger.
The lack of education in the community, coupled with low rate of social awareness has further proved to be a stumbling block on way of their amelioration.
Mr Manjhi who too belongs to the Dalit community claims to have faced many such hardship in life.
Last year, the department had mooted an ambitious plan for rat farming and to bring rodents on the menu of five star hotels to rehabilitate the Dalits but later shot down the plan finally following strong protests by the community. The Dalits staged aggressive protests across the state against the government plan saying: “We want to catch (computer) mouse, and not the mice in the hole”.