When school is an uphill climb away

Amin Kadraka, a 14-year-old from the Dongria Kondh community, navigates the digital world but lacks access to formal education.

Amin Kadraka, 14, can tell you all about the latest Instagram reels, go through his Facebook friend list, and expertly navigate through his favourite YouTube videos. His fingers move quickly across his cell phone, and his viewing is dependent on Google’s algorithms. Beyond this digital world, he struggles to read.

Amin belongs to the Dongria Kondh community, a particularly vulnerable tribal group (PVTG), whose only brush with literacy is through the smartphone he holds dear. Living with his parents in one of the nine households in Lahunikhunti village, perched on a hill in Bissamcuttack block of Rayagada district in Odisha, Amin’s world is largely limited to the forest he lives in and his weekly trips to Chatikona village, a weekly tribal market. With no formal schooling, his world is his life in the forest, and he has no aspirations to leave.

Formal education has not touched several villages in the Niyamgiri hill range of the Rayagada district administration. However, data on the Project Appraisal, Budgeting, Achievements, and Data Handling System (PRABANDH), a new Central government scheme for school education interventions, show there are only 16 people who have never been enrolled in the entire district. The on-ground reality is different. In Rayagada, there are only 44 high schools that cater to the district’s tribal and Dalit populations.

Children in the Dongria Kondh community are introduced to formal education primarily because of their proximity to government-run residential schools and accessible roads.

In Lahunikhunti village, Amin remains outside the school system, a concern that continues to trouble educationists and rights activists. Despite four decades of focused interventions, Amin and his peers in the village have yet to be integrated into the mainstream education system.

“No one has ever encouraged me to enrol in school, and it is not easy to get there, with the forested path making the journey so tough,” he says. On the way, he may encounter bears or leopards. The road is at least half a kilometre uphill, and the closest school is 3 km away. “I am not sure how education will change my life or my family’s,” Amin says.

A decade ago, the Dongria Kondh tribe captured national and international attention for their steady resistance to the proposed bauxite mining in the ecologically sensitive Niyamgiri hill range by the Vedanta Group, which ultimately led the government to shelve the project. Following a Supreme Court order, the Dongria Kondhs emphatically rejected Vedanta’s mining plans in 12 gram sabhas in 2013, an event that was hailed as India’s first environmental referendum.