This article is based on the semi-structured interviews of two people I met while working as a teacher in a school in Pune. The later sections link the biographical trajectories of these young people to structural inequalities and the failure of the education policy in addressing them. The interviews were conducted in 2023. Verbal informed consent was obtained from the participants. Their names have been changed to protect their privacy.

Anju Sunil Pawar, kitchen staff

Anju, 19 years old, was born in Siddheshwar village in Hingoli district of Maharashtra. She belongs to the Banjara caste and identifies as Hindu. Her mother tongue is Lamani. She is the oldest of her parents’ four children—her sister is 16, and her two brothers are 14 and 12 years old, respectively. Her family moved to Lavale village in Pune when she was 11 and has spent most of the last 6 years here. Growing up, her father earned a living from working at construction sites. He suffered from alcoholism until very recently, and her mother and her mother’s close relatives brought the children up. Her father brought the family to Karnataka, where he was working, and abandoned them there. He became sober a year ago and works at the school as a security guard at night and as a carpenter during the day. Her mother works in the school’s kitchen as a helper.

In the village school in Siddheshwar, where she studied from 1st to 3rd grades, the instruction was in Marathi, and she struggled to understand what her teachers said in class. Teachers scolded the students and even used a stick. Then, at 8-9 years of age, Anju was sent to Karnataka to look after her maternal aunt’s children. When she returned from Karnataka, Anju and her sister were sent to a residential ashram school in Parbhani district, where her father’s close relatives lived, for two years. She completed 4th and 5th grades in this school and topped her class.

When she was in 6th grade, her mother and paternal grandmother brought the girls back to Lavale. She missed 6 months of schooling before she could be enrolled in 7th grade at her old school. The school is only up to 7th grade, and, for 8th to 10th grade, there is another school. After she finished 7th grade, 15-year-old Anju was married to Sunil Pawar. He was 23 years old then and worked as a banner painter in Mumbai. At 16, Anju had her first child. At 18, her second. She got her uterus removed recently. Anju wants to qualify for the 10th and 12th grade board exams. She visited the Lavale High School recently and got the 10th-grade textbooks from one of the teachers. She believes completing her education will help her find secure jobs and give a better life to her children.

Nilesh Jadhav, painter and floor installer

Nilesh Jadhav, 23 years old, worked briefly at the school I taught in, painting walls and grills. He belongs to the Banjara caste, the same as the minister Sanjay Rathod, the Shiv Sena politician and MLA from Yavatmal district, he said. The Banjara community is one of the denotified tribes or Vimukta Jati. Nilesh described his caste occupation as that of nomadic herders, raising cows, buffalo and goats. He has pride in his community and their sanskruti or heritage. His family consists of his parents, two brothers and a sister. His father studied up to the 7th standard, while his mother can only sign her name. His parents still work as farmers and cultivate wheat, potatoes, onions, daal, chillies and peanuts. One of his brothers works for Big Basket in Chakan, Pune, packaging and scanning produce and products for home delivery, while the other lives with their parents. His sister, younger than him, is married and has a child. 

He is trained as an epoxy flooring worker and has done flooring work for a pharmaceutical company called Shalina and a mobile company. His training began when he was 20 years old under a master. He has been working since he turned 18. The job is hazardous; for example, the fumes of turpentine are strong enough to make a person dizzy, and if they are perched at a height while painting, losing balance can be fatal.

Nilesh is currently based out of Manora taluka in Washim district, Vidarbha, and travels for work. He earns 1000-1200 rupees on the days he finds work. He is well-travelled and has worked in Bengal, Sikkim, Telangana and Uttarakhand. There was even an opportunity for him to work in Algeria, but he could not get a passport. He is associated with a private company in Kalewadi Phata, Pune, that specialises in epoxy and polyurethane flooring. 

Nilesh studied at an all-boys government school called Dinbai High School in Yavatmal from 5th to 10th grade, receiving entry after he qualified for the entrance exam in 4th grade. He also qualified for the scholarship exams in 7th and 10th grades and received the amount of 2200-2300 rupees each time. He was an exceptional student and came first in class consecutively from 4th to 9th grades, scoring 87 and 67 per cent marks in 10th and 12th grades, respectively. He described Dinbai High School’s environment as the best school in the district and focused on academics. There were 5 sections—A to E—in each grade, and the most struggling students would be put in section A. They had 7 classes of 30 minutes each every day, and studied a total of at least 7 subjects (English, Hindi, Marathi, maths, science, social studies and sports). The school had a functioning science lab, and he recalled observing amoeba under a sukshmadarshi or microscope. The playing grounds were quite large, and he has played table tennis, basketball and won a gold medal in a 100 metres race. There were instances of bullying of younger students by their older counterparts.

He aspired to go to college and study engineering like many of his classmates, but did not have the money to fund his higher education. One of his teachers reached out to support him financially, but before anything could be finalised, the teacher was transferred. He explored government jobs and visited the Bombay Municipal Corporation (BMC) for the post of a junior clerk. But he found out that the process of the written exam and interview would take time and that only applicants with a graduation degree have a chance. Now, at 23 years of age, he says he is not in a position to go back to studying—there’s no time, money, and he has lost his power of concentration in academics.

His parents farm 2 acres of land in the Yavatmal district. They recently lost half their crop of 40 quintals of wheat to unseasonal rains, and their expected income would be halved from 1.20 lakh rupees to 60 thousand rupees. He said only farmers know the anguish, the sleepless nights they experience when the weather turns over ripening wheat fields.

Nilesh is attached to his parents and wants to make their lives easier.

Capital, symbolic violence and social reproduction

Anju and Nilesh belong to the same caste, but their differing life circumstances, especially their gender and their parents’ income levels and cultural capital in the form of education, played a major role in how their lives have turned out so far. On the other hand, both have suffered symbolic violence, and both exemplify social reproduction.

Nilesh’s father is more educated and has land to farm, whereas Anju’s father is comparatively less educated and worked on construction sites until recently. The difficult conditions of construction labour most likely pushed Anju’s father to drink. As a result, even though they were both good students and interested in learning, Nilesh received a stable home life and was educated in the best school in his district, while Anju’s childhood was marked by traumatic events and her schooling was continually interrupted. Nilesh is still unmarried, while Anju was married and gave birth while still a minor. Patriarchy, notions of sexual purity played a role in her early marriage (Parry, 2005).

While it is common for the older child, whether a boy or a girl, to compromise on their schooling to take care of the younger children of the house, the fact that Anju is the eldest and a girl meant that she had to shoulder childcare responsibilities of her siblings and cousins (Parry, 2005). That her younger sister stopped attending school to take care of Anju’s children is life coming full circle.

The strongest common thread between Anju and Nilesh is that they both belong to a denotified tribe and grew up in a culture, speaking a language that has been marginalised. In our conversation, Nilesh described his caste as “danger”, that people distrust members of his caste. For Anju, it was difficult to learn in her Marathi medium school during her foundational years.

Despite being more educated than their parents, Anju and Nilesh occupy positions similar to those of their parents in society. Nilesh, who was a school topper, could not afford to attend an engineering college or attain degrees to get a permanent job in the municipal corporation, a common desire of those from marginalised backgrounds (Vasavi, 2014). Anju’s parents could not afford to keep her until she finished school. As a result, they are employed in jobs that demand hard labour and yet are marginalised and perceived as less valuable by dominant classes.

It is clear that their socio-cultural and economic circumstances prevented them from attaining the level of education they aspired to and showed aptitude for.

The education system and the Anjus of India

The Right to Education Act, 2009, made education from 6 to 14 years of age compulsory and free and, in doing so, gave access to education to children from marginalised backgrounds. The New Education Policy, 2020, expands this access to 3 to 18 years. Yet the policy falls short of providing for a school system where all children have access to the same quality of schooling, which could significantly reduce structural inequalities responsible for perpetuating social injustice.

Despite attending the free village schools and the ashram school, Anju did not have access to the kind of education that would have led to an escape from poverty. Her parents knew this, and Anju knew this. Even with a 10th-grade certificate in hand, the job opportunities available to her are not going to change. Nilesh, too, was held back from fulfilling his potential due to financial precarity mired in caste.

Without a uniform and inclusive school system, even 17 years after the RTE, stratification in schools (and society) has only increased, with the children of the elite enrolling in IB and Cambridge Board-affiliated schools, those of the upper middle classes in convent or high-fee schools like DPS, the poor in low-fee private schools and the poorest in government schools. By omitting to provide for high-quality public schooling, the education policy falls short of addressing inequality in society.

References:

1. Parry, J. (2005). Changing childhoods in industrial Chhattisgarh. In R. Chopra & P. Jeffery (Eds.), Educational regimes in contemporary India (pp. xx–xx). Sage Publications.
2. Tschurenev, J. (2019). Inequality, difference, and the politics of education for all. Südasien-Seminar der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
3. Vasavi, A. R. (2014). “Government Brahmin”: Caste, the educated unemployed, and the reproduction of inequalities. Working Papers of the Max Weber Foundation’s Transnational Research Group India, Poverty Reduction and Policy for the Poor between the State and Private Actors: Education Policy in India Since the Nineteenth Century.
4. Velaskar, P. (1990). Unequal schooling as a factor in the reproduction of social inequality in India. Sociological Bulletin, 39(1–2), 131–145.

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Ishita Sinha has worked as a teacher for many years, most recently at The Montessori Academy, Pune. She did her master’s in education from TISS, Mumbai.