Beyond books: How a Kolkata school is teaching girls to build self-reliant futures

A residential school of 1000 girl children on the outskirts of Kolkata is reimagining education beyond the books and four walls of the classroom. Through practical skill development based on real-life examples, the young girls are learning and paving the way for change. 

The school, Adhigam Bhoomi, by the non-profit Help Us Help Them, has been running this free-of-cost residential school program where students have a no-books curriculum up to class 5 and learn their lessons through practical examples and life lessons. 

The Adhigam Bhoomi campus in Joka, on the outskirts of Kolkata.
| Photo Credit:
Shrabana Chatterjee

Here, the girls learn 17 different skills, including pottery, weaving, tailoring, farming, and more. From class 6, they also have book-based education along with skill development to ensure they also fit into mainstream society. The initiators of the program say that the main idea behind this unique module was to help the children from rural areas develop enough skills to go back home to their villages and become self-sustaining entrepreneurs in the long run. 

“They learn maths through the weaving and counting patterns, they learn about biology and agriculture through the food we grow on campus, which they grow with their own hands for their own meals, they make cleaning products, soaps in the labs, and learn chemistry lessons,” Rupa Bhattacharjee, vice principal of Adhigam Bhoomi, said. She said that initially, the parents of the children, who are mostly from tribal areas, were hesitant about the unconventional teaching methods, but they have slowly come to appreciate the unique methods. 

The students learn to make their own sanitary napkins from scratch, learn mat and cloth weaving from cotton, and soil science through pottery. According to the teachers, it has now become a zero-waste campus with a self-sustaining structure, which helps them grow most of their food indoors and produce their manure from food waste.

Adhigam Bhoomi students making sanitary pads from scratch for their own usage inside the school campus
| Photo Credit:
Shrabana Chatterjee

One of the co-founders of Help Us Help Them, Mukti Gupta, said that they now have 100 schools across West Bengal where they are running the same module that was started at the Adhigam Bhoomi school in Joka. 

“Our plan is to give a proposal to the West Bengal government and also to the Prime Minister to make this a learning model in as many schools as possible across India. It can be achieved within the available education budget of the country,” Ms Gupta added. She also added that they want the skilled young girls to go back to their villages and start their own initiatives with things they can easily find in their own areas, so that they can stop migrating outside to find better work.  

“We have been with them on this since the time of acquiring the land. We want to help the children find skill-based work when they go ahead in life and pass out from here. We plan to conduct expansion up to class 10,” Sajjan Bhajanka, chairman, CenturyPly said. The company has been supporting the initiative since its inception.