As part of Badibata, the children of Gopanpally Thanda Government primary school recently held an impressive rally going around the Gopanpally Thanda village carrying placards and shouting slogans like “Protect the government schools to protect human values and provide quality education to us, Appoint teachers, Construct classrooms in our school, Admit your children to our school” etc.
Badibata (Enrolment drive) is a massive campaign taken up in the month of June in Andhra Pradesh to enroll all school age children. The objective of the programme is to identify children above five years of age and also those in the age group of six to 14 years who had dropped out of schools and enroll them in schools.
According to the Right to Education Act, there should be 5 teachers and 5 class rooms in the school if the strength is more than 120. In Gopanpally Government Thanda School, there are only 2 teachers and 3 class rooms though the strength exceeds 120. Another grave problem facing the children is that there are no toilet facilities for girls. The children appealed to the authorities to consider and provide at-least these facilities and increase the number of teachers that are mentioned in the RTE Act.
In this rally, University of Hyderabad (UoH) Associate Professor and adviser of Project Akshara: Dr.K. Laxminarayana, Principal of the school Smt. Soni Bai, Anganwadi teachers: N. Shantha Bai, Pioneers of the Project Akshara from University of Hyderabad: StanzinChoron, Pradeep Kumar K. SasiRekha, Vennela, Ratna, Santhosh, Roshan, Bhaskar, Adinarayana, Rohith, Vamsi have participated.
For further details on Project Akshara undertaken by the students of UoH you may contact Mr. Pradeep Kumar on mbl: 09440771181
Please see the video of Project Akshara on https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=6g_iyXWvnGA