The Santal Education Project.

There are several provisions in India’s constitution designed to raise the educational level of tribals. These include free and compulsory education for all until the age of fourteen. The educational difficulties faced by tribals have been addressed through bilingual or multilingual programmes that start with education in the child’s mother tongue, then transit to the regional or state language, and finally progress to the study of English. This three-language formula, however, remains in an experimental stage, and its practice is limited to isolated pilot projects.


The challenges of tribal education are daunting. There are 418 different tribes in India, with even more languages and dialects. Each group is also associated with a specific region through language, food habits, occupational characteristics and geography. To accommodate these diverse and culturally distinct communities with a single educational policy is a mammoth task, verging on the impossible.
Thus, despite good intentions, tribal-education policies are mostly dysfunctional. And when such systematic dysfunction continues for years or even generations, social unrest erupts. Due to extreme dissatisfaction, a large section of the tribals in the Lalgarh area of West Bengal declared a non-cooperation movement against the local establishment last year. The media spoke of a “tribal revolution”. The assessment of The Statesman, a Kolkata-based daily, was accurate: “The ‘Lalgarh incident’ … was the result of years-long ineffectiveness of the government’s development policies in the tribal region.”

Most teachers are from non-Santal communities. They hail from a middle-class background and are hardly aware of the socio-cultural life-world of the children. This lack of understanding creates serious problems.
Understanding the gravity of these problems, the Ghosaldanga Adibasi Seva Sangha (GASS), a non-governmental organisation, started the Rolf Schoembs Vidyashram (RSV), a non-formal Santal tribal school, at Ghosaldanga village in 1996. It was named after an astrophysicist from Munich, who donated the money needed to start the project in his will. At present, it has five classes – kindergarten to class IV. Moreover, it runs a hostel for secondary school students.

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