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In Bastar, a fear that school shutdowns help Maoist recruitment -Ritesh Mishra

-Hindustan Times

In the last of its five part series on the pandemic, school shutdowns and its effects on India’s children, HT travelled to Bastar to find that not only could this mean the usual learning loss, or problems with the lack of connectivity, but a deeper, more worrying malaise.

Bijapur: There is a main road that runs close by, but the government school in Bhairamgarh is hidden from view. The campus is surrounded by Bastar’s staple mahua and tendu trees. On each window are clotheslines, and clothes, many tattered. The school is residential, catering to students from classes 1 to 10 in the Bijapur district of Bastar, one of the epicentres for of India’s Maoist conflict.

The winter sun is high and the field, which has more stones and thorns than grass, is abuzz with activity. Not of children playing, but of them washing their own steel utensils at the one handpump in the school. It is the Sunday of December 12, and there is one teacher managing affairs, the Superintendent having travelled home to meet his family. But apart from the mischief that he must keep an eye out for, the lone 26-year-old old teacher glances anxiously at his wards, and speaks of a much greater worry. Schools in Chhattisgarh opened after 18 months of closure on March 2020, but almost a fourth of his students have not returned. “There are a total of 370 children in the school. Only 280 have come back.”

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