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By:

Shoumojit Banerjee

27 August 2024 at 9:57:52 am

Classroom of Courage

In drought-scarred Maharashtra, a couple’s experiment in democratic schooling is turning child beggars into model citizens In the parched stretches of Maharashtra, from Solapur to the drought-hit villages of Marathwada, a modest social experiment has quietly unfolded for nearly two decades. It is neither a grand government scheme nor a corporate-backed charity. Since 2007, the Ajit Foundation, founded by Mahesh and Vinaya Nimbalkar, has worked with children living at the sharpest edges of...

Classroom of Courage

In drought-scarred Maharashtra, a couple’s experiment in democratic schooling is turning child beggars into model citizens In the parched stretches of Maharashtra, from Solapur to the drought-hit villages of Marathwada, a modest social experiment has quietly unfolded for nearly two decades. It is neither a grand government scheme nor a corporate-backed charity. Since 2007, the Ajit Foundation, founded by Mahesh and Vinaya Nimbalkar, has worked with children living at the sharpest edges of society in Maharashtra. The foundation has become a home for out-of-school children, those who have never enrolled, the children of migrant labourers and single parents, and those who scavenge at garbage dumps or drift between odd jobs. To call their foundation an “NGO” is to miss the point. Vinaya Nimbalkar describes it as a “democratic laboratory”, where education is not merely instruction but an initiation into citizenship. The couple were once government schoolteachers with the Solapur Zilla Parishad, leading stable lives. Yet what they witnessed unsettled them: children who had never held a pencil, begging at traffic signals or sorting refuse for a living. Prompted by this reality, the Nimbalkars resigned their jobs to work full-time for the education of such children. Leap of Faith They began modestly, teaching children in migrant settlements in Solapur and using their own salaries to pay small honorariums to activists. Funds soon ran dry, and volunteers drifted away. Forced out of their home because of their commitment to the cause, they started a one-room school where Vinaya, Mahesh, their infant son Srijan and forty children aged six to fourteen lived together as an unlikely family. The experiment later moved to Barshi in the Solapur district with support from Anandvan. Rural hardship, financial uncertainty and the pandemic repeatedly tested their resolve. At one stage, they assumed educational guardianship of nearly 200 children from families that survived by collecting scrap on the village outskirts. Eventually, the foundation relocated to Talegaon Dabhade near Pune, where it now runs a residential hostel. Twenty-five children currently live and study there. The numbers may seem modest, but the ambition is not. Democracy in Practice What distinguishes the Ajit Foundation is not only who it serves but also how it operates. Within its walls, democracy is practised through a Children’s Gram Panchayat and a miniature Municipal Council elected by the children themselves. Young candidates canvass, hold meetings and present their budgets. Children maintain accounts and share decisions about chores, activities and certain disciplinary matters. In a country where democratic culture is often reduced to voting, the foundation’s approach is quietly radical. It treats children from marginalised backgrounds as citizens in formation. The right to choose — whether to focus on sport, cooking, mathematics or cultural activities — is respected. “We try never to take away what is their own,” says Vinaya Nimbalkar. Rather than forcing every child into a uniform academic mould, individual abilities are encouraged. A boy skilled in daily calculations may not be pushed into hours of bookish study; a girl who excels in cooking may lead the kitchen team. For children who have known only precarity, standing for election, managing a budget or speaking at a meeting can be transformative. On International Women’s Day, the foundation seeks visibility not just for praise but for partnership. If you are inspired by their mission, consider supporting or collaborating—your involvement can help extend opportunities to more children in need.

Saving the Aravallis or Saving Face?

India’s oldest hills have become collateral damage in a political culture where environmental concern is performative and opportunism perennial.

Public faith in India’s political class has sunk to a low ebb, and the Aravallis tell the story better than most parliamentary debates. These ancient hills - older than the Himalayas and far more consequential for north India’s ecology – have today become props in a theatre of convenience. The same leaders who once petitioned the Supreme Court for mining rights now don sackcloth and shout ‘Save Aravalli’ slogans when the court tightens the rules.


This chameleon instinct is not confined to one party. Across the spectrum, ideology is something to be changed as power demands. Ordinary citizens have learned to their chagrin that political alliances are transactional, stances reversible and U-turns, instead of being a political embarrassment, has been recast as ‘smart strategy.’ In this vein, environmental concern is weaponized as a tool for mobilising supporters, embarrassing rivals or protecting old revenue streams.


Toxic Silence

Nowhere is this hypocrisy more visible than in the governance of the Aravali range and the choking air of Delhi-NCR. Each winter, as the region’s air-quality index breaches the 400-mark deemed hazardous even for short exposure, around 300 million people inhale what amounts to a slow poison. Yet this year’s winter session of Parliament passed without a single substantive debate on the crisis. There was, however, time for late-night arguments over politically lucrative causes, time for renaming schemes to suit vote banks, and even time for a convivial tea party hosted by the Lok Sabha Speaker, attended by leaders from every major party.


Calling the Aravallis an ‘ecosystem’ is itself a mild act of resistance. Officialdom prefers narrower terms like ‘mountain’ or ‘mountain range’ because definitions matter in court. A mountain can be measured, sliced into contours and leased. An ecosystem demands protection across landscapes. The Aravallis stretch across Rajasthan, Haryana, Delhi and Gujarat, binding together tiger reserves such as Sariska, wildlife sanctuaries like Mount Abu, Kumbhalgarh, Asola Bhatti and Jessore, and dozens of smaller forests that regulate groundwater, block desertification and trap dust before it smothers the plains. If one reduces this living system to a set of peaks, then the low hills between them become expendable.


Convenient Crusade

The political opportunism surrounding this reduction is most stark in Rajasthan. Today, the Congress party presents itself as a champion of the hills, railing against court rulings and warning of ecological apocalypse. Yet for decades it presided over, and often facilitated, precisely the mining practices it now condemns. Illegal quarrying flourished for 20–25 years through a simple alchemy in which forest land was reclassified as ‘revenue land’ while the maps were quietly altered, officials bribed and illegality dressed up as compliance. The profits ran into billions.


The Supreme Court began intervening as early as the 1990s, alarmed by complaints of ecological collapse, falling water tables and runaway air pollution. In 2002, a probe by the Central Empowered Committee recommended a ban on mining across the Aravallis in Haryana and Rajasthan, citing irreversible damage. Rajasthan’s Congress government appealed. The court relented partially, allowing existing leases to continue but barring new ones.


What followed was a masterclass in regulatory creativity. In 2003, a state-appointed panel invoked a formula attributed to an American geomorphologist, defining only hills above 100 metres as ‘mountains’ worthy of protection. Everything shorter became fair game. The effect was devastating: entire hills were reduced to stumps or erased from maps. When the BJP took power later that year, it issued leases under the same formula, proving that ecological amnesia crosses party lines.


The Supreme Court returned to the matter in 2005, halting new leases without environmental clearance, and by 2009 imposed a full ban in parts of Haryana. Subsequent reports, including one by the Forest Survey of India in 2010, documented extensive damage in Rajasthan’s Aravalli districts. Orders followed demanding clearer definitions and stronger conservation.


The latest controversy turns on cartography. Earlier surveys treated the range as polygons in which continuous systems where lower hills between higher peaks were integral. A 2025 revision shifted to contour lines, protecting only land above 100 metres and leaving intervening stretches exposed. Congress leaders now decry this as a death sentence for 90 percent of the hills. Yet it was under Congress rule, between 1998 and 2023, that the worst destruction occurred. Official data record at least 31 hills obliterated, thousands of illegal quarries, and millions of tonnes of stone extracted in defiance of court orders. There was no mass ‘Save Aravalli’ movement then.


The irony deepens when the party’s chosen standard-bearers are examined. One prominent leader of the current campaign belongs to a family that owns a granite and marble company operating in the Aravallis and has himself faced allegations related to illegal occupation of quarry land. Accusations of “mining mafias” ring hollow when the lines between politics and extraction have long been blurred.


Such double standards help explain the public’s cynicism. When leaders dismiss the common citizen as irrelevant, or insist that policy is the preserve of insiders, they reinforce the sense that governance is a closed club. Even parties that claim to speak for the aam aadmi have failed to deliver breathable air in the capital they govern.


The Aravallis are north India’s green lungs, a climatic barrier against the Thar desert, a reservoir of biodiversity and history. To save them requires less slogan-shouting and more consistency: clear ecological definitions, enforcement that survives changes of government, and a willingness to confront vested interests including those within one’s own ranks.


Until then, ‘Save Aravalli’ will remain what it has largely been so far: not a conservation ethic, but a convenient cry which will be abandoned when power beckons elsewhere. 


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