Going Back to School

By Subrata Nagchoudhury 

after months school children step out to go to school

Nikki Yambem’s face turns red but she looks amused as she discovers her palm smeared with ink. “It must have been the drawing class,” Nikki murmurs, hiding her inky palm, locking it into a tight fist. “It is dirty with ink after so many months,” she says as she flips through her drawing book. Back in school after four months, Nikki, a class IV student of Nirmalabas Higher Secondary School for girls, and her 14 classmates squeeze into the waiting Maruti van that will drop them home. “It’s nice to be back in school,” say the girls.

On January 11, over 4,190 schools in Manipur reopened after being shut for over four months on a boycott called on September 9 to protest an alleged fake encounter in Imphal.


In response to the boycott call, students disappeared from campuses and in their place came securitymen in camouflaged outfits. School premises turned into security posts and the streets became parade grounds for gun-toting security men.

But the new year has brought hope to thousands of students and their parents. Finally last week, students brushed the dust off their idle school bags, wore their uniforms and rushed to school.


Parents had a lot to do with the opening of schools and colleges. Along with civil society groups, they exerted immense pressure on agitating students’ unions, forcing them to suspend the boycott call on educational institutions.
Now, the streets of Imphal are once again alive with the sounds of children making their way to school. The desolate school compounds are again a riot of colours as students in uniforms return and the chatter is back in classrooms.


“I feel so relieved now that my daughter Alice has got back into her school rhythm. She will go to Class X this year but with classes being suspended for the last four-and-half months, we were worried about losing a year,” says S.Suchitra, a Manipur Pollution Control Board employee whose youngest son studies in Don Bosco in Imphal.
Sister Victima, principal of Nirmalabas School, is relieved too. She was apprehensive that students would find it difficult to concentrate on their studies after such a long time but says she was amazed at how quickly they got back to their books. “There’s little we can do in all this mess. Blaming the darkness does not help. It is better to raise our hands in prayer and do whatever we can for the children,” she says.


Dr Elangbam Nixon Singh, a reader in management in Mizoram University, is happy to be able to drop his daughter off at Nirmalabas this week before he leaves for Mizoram. “For us, it was a self-inflicting, injurious agitation. How could one accept the damage it was causing our own sons and daughters? The cause for the agitation was right but the mode probably was not. The sad part of the story is that at the end of the day, it is money that matters, not the welfare of our children,” says Singh, hinting that money changed hands to facilitate an agreement between the government and the agitating groups to call off the boycott.


Frequent agitations are a reason many parents who can afford to, send their children to schools in other states. “The number of children from Manipur studying outside the state because of the continuous turmoil in the valley falls between 50,000 and 100,000,” says Singh.


Officials of the Board of Secondary Education in Manipur admit that there is a continuous exodus of students to other states. In fact, Imphal residents are constantly on the lookout for good residential schools outside Manipur. Arun Kumar Agarwal, a hardware merchant in Thangal market whose family has been settled in the valley for generations, is one of them. He has been waiting for a Rajasthan-based group to come to Manipur this year to conduct admission tests. It’s a regular practice for schools across India to scout for students in Manipur.


“I am seriously looking for a good boarding school in Rajasthan to send my daughter, Suhawi, a class IX student, to,” he says. Schools in Manipur may have reopened but Agarwal is still anxious. “It will take just seconds for normalcy to be shattered and things to get back to where they were,” he says.


There are other issues to be sorted out as well, the most contentious being school fee arrears and transport charges for the four-and-a-half months that the schools were shut for. Singh has to pay Rs 15,000 for his three school-going children in the next few days. School managements across Imphal valley have refused to waive the fees for the months the schools were shut.



IT’S not just schools that were affected by the boycott call. Over the last four months, Dhana Manjuree College of Science, Commerce and Arts, one of Imphal’s most prestigious colleges, turned into a ghost compound.


Residents at the hostel for science students, particularly those who belong to remote districts of the state, were the worst affected since they could not go back home. P. Brightva, a final year student of B.Sc Physics (Hons) from Senapati district, was one of the 20 residents of the hostel who stayed back even though there were no classes.
Now that their college has opened, students are worried over the classes they have missed. At the Dhana Manjuree College, Th. Jatin Kumar, A. Jogi and A.K. Milan talk anxiously about their attendance. The UGC, they say, recommends 188 classes in an academic year but on an average, they get to attend about 80 to 100 classes. And this year, they add nervously, that number has gone down to about 40. With the final exams approaching and a large chunk of the syllabus still to be completed, their worries are only going up.


To help students make up for lost time, some teachers even held “secret classes” when the college was shut but that was not always feasible, says Purnachandra, a student, since the sponsors of the ‘shutdown’ were always on the prowl.


Students admit they were in a dilemma over whether to support the boycott call or not. “We were in two minds. We condemn the encounter death and the killing of Rabina, a pregnant woman in a market place by security forces in July 2009. But at the same time, too much of violence, threats and intimidation by the other side (read ‘underground groups’) are also taking its toll, especially on educational institutions. We want good education and we want educational institutes to be treated as free zones, free from agitation,” says a student.


The suspension of the agitation in schools and colleges in Imphal was preceded by a long and bitter debate in Manipur on what was more important: the right to life or the right to education. While sponsors of the agitation maintained that right to life was more important than the right to education, many parents pointed out the futility of such debates. At the end of the day, it is money that rules, say Imphal residents. They refer to reports that allege that the two Joint Action Committees that were formed to spearhead the agitation against excesses committed by security forces after the encounter last July were “bribed” by the government to call off the class boycott. Public support to these organisations has plummeted drastically since. 

James Bond, a third year LLB student and president of the All Manipur Students’ Union, the powerful apex body of students whose control over the student community was near complete till recently, now sounds apologetic. “We faced tremendous pressure from parents who said we should agitate but shutting down educational institutions would spoil their children’s future. We acknowledged their concerns and withdrew the four-month-old boycott,” says Bond. 

At the start of the stir, the students’ union had placed 13 demands before the government but scaled them down to just one before calling off the agitation. “That demand was to release all those who were arrested under the National Security Act. The government agreed and we suspended the stir,” says Bond. He now plans to approach college and university managements and press for extra coaching classes.


Pradeep Singh, president of the Kangleipak Students’ Association (KSA) that has influence in about 70-odd colleges in Manipur, admits that dwindling public support for the class boycott call “empowered the government and weakened the students’ organisations.”


As the chatter in classrooms ebbs and students pore over their books, a niggling worry replaces the euphoria over schools and colleges reopening. How will the students make up for the classes missed and the time lost?


L. Raj Mohan Singh, secretary of the Board of Secondary Education in Manipur, says he has to adhere by the Supreme Court ruling that stipulates all board exams be completed by June 12. “There is no choice but to comply with the ruling. But such a loss of time can never be compensated. Classroom lessons are a continuous process. The student has to assimilate, understand and the teacher has to crosscheck what they have learnt. Once this is disturbed, everything is disturbed,” he says.