Education Under Fast Tracks

Rajesh Sharma's school has no desks or chairs. The "roof" is a metro railway bridge 10 meters overhead. The blackboards are black rectangles painted on the wall of the adjacent station. Despite its makeshift nature, the school offers hope to poor children in the neighborhood.

Mr Sharma, 41, who runs a grocery across the street from the Yamuna Vihar metro station, started the school three years ago to offer free education to the children of the local laborers and farmers.

Being poor and mostly illiterate, the families of these children usually either see no need for them to be educated, or worry about the costs involved, particularly when sending them to school means they cannot help to support the family.

Mr Sharma himself dropped out of college in his third year because of his family's financial difficulties. The idea to open a school came to him on a morning walk along the Yamuna river when he saw some children weeding and picking flowers.

"I asked them which school they go to and they looked at me at with no answer. It had not occurred to me before that not every child has access to a school." Mr Sharma says.

So Mr Sharma and his friend, Laxmi Chandra, a retired teacher, teach classes under the metro bridge for two hours every weekday morning. The students, who now number more than 70, sit on foam mats and recite after their teachers as trains rumble overhead and traffic rolls past a few meters away. While the younger children learn the English alphabet, those between 10 and 16 study mathematics, from multiplication tables to geometry, taught by Mr Chandra.

Mr Sharma initially bore the entire cost of providing the children with textbooks, pencils and exercise books.

Over time, people who heard about the school began dropping off supplies, sometimes anonymously.

"One man came with 60 school bags once. He would not tell me his name or what he did. He said none of that mattered as long as the children got a decent education."

Mr Sharma started the school with the aim of providing children from poor families with a basic education.

However, after the government enforced the 2009 Right to Education Act last year, which guarantees free schooling for children between the ages of 6 and 14, Mr Sharma decided to focus on preparing the children for admission to school and helping them to cope with the curriculum.

However the difficulties in the cause don't end there. The children of farmers and laborers are reluctant to enroll, influenced mainly by the prejudice of their parents, most of whom are illiterate.

Mr Sharma has to battle constantly to get parents to send their children to his classes for just a couple of hours each day.

"They say, 'My son is too old now to catch up with the rest of his age group and study. Let us put him to work'," he said.

"The excuses for the daughters are even worse. Most of the time they cannot even bring themselves to believe that she deserves an education. Other times they are just waiting to marry her off."

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