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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.

The SIR Dilemma: Pressure, Conspiracy or Paradox?

India’s routine voter-list revision has been recast as a political weapon, placing frontline election workers in the crossfire.

For most of independent India’s history, the periodic cleaning of electoral rolls has been among the duller rituals of democracy and a largely uncontested exercise. The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voter lists, conducted roughly once every few years, has rarely troubled the public imagination. However, that has changed now as the current cycle, rolling across a dozen states and Union Territories and beginning in Bihar earlier this year, has turned a bureaucratic exercise into a national controversy laced with suspicion, intimidation and most disturbingly, deaths among booth-level officers (BLOs) - the foot soldiers of the Election Commission.


Twelve such revisions have been carried out since the first comprehensive roll overhaul after independence. None until now was accompanied by reports of BLOs dying while on duty. Earlier this year, as SIRs commenced in states as varied as Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and Tamil Nadu, news emerged of officers succumbing to heart attacks and other causes. The timing has unsettled the public and invited darker interpretations. Has administrative pressure intensified? Or has a political climate been deliberately engineered to make routine electoral work hazardous?


Voter Resistance

Interviews with BLOs point to a more prosaic but no less troubling explanation. The chief burden they describe is not pressure from superiors but resistance from voters themselves. Non-cooperation - sometimes passive, sometimes openly hostile - has become widespread. Households refuse to fill out forms, withhold documents or insist that absent family members be retained on the rolls indefinitely. Some BLOs report threats. Others speak of being trapped between supervisors demanding speed and citizens refusing to engage.


In Uttar Pradesh alone, as of December this month, more than 3.14 crore voter forms remained unverified out of a total electorate of 15.44 crore. The Election Commission was forced to extend deadlines to December 26 in Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and Tamil Nadu, and to December 18 in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Previous SIRs rarely required such indulgence. Why now?


The question has quickly become political. Opposition parties have cast the SIR as a stealth version of the National Register of Citizens, accusing the Election Commission of laying the groundwork for mass disenfranchisement. Mamata Banerjee, West Bengal’s chief minister, has been explicit: the “real motive,” she says, is the NRC by another name. Others argue that voter deletions are being pursued selectively, especially in opposition-leaning areas. These claims persist despite the fact that SIRs are conducted under the same legal framework as before, and despite the curious reality that many citizens who routinely abstain from voting nonetheless insist on remaining on the rolls.


Contradictory Narratives

The suspicion is fed by contradictory narratives. Media reports from West Bengal have highlighted migrants near the Bangladesh border attempting to leave the country, some brandishing Aadhaar cards. Elsewhere, BLOs recount encounters with families that openly declare their refusal to cooperate, citing party instructions or fears stoked by political rhetoric. What was once a technical audit is now treated as an existential threat.


That the most intense resistance appears in BJP-ruled states like Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh has further sharpened conspiracy theories. Are non-cooperating voters aligned with particular parties? Are they deliberately obstructing the process to preserve inflated rolls or protect ineligible names? Proving intent is difficult. But the pattern is hard to ignore. Where cooperation collapses, the burden falls squarely on BLOs, many of whom are schoolteachers or low-ranking officials drafted into election duty.


Political actors, especially those outside the NDA, have seized on the deaths of BLOs to advance a singular narrative: that unbearable administrative pressure has driven officials to suicide or fatal distress. The charge is potent but conveniently omits the environment in which these officers work. Reports from Noida and Bijnor describe voters locking forms away, refusing access, or issuing threats if names are questioned. Supervisors push for compliance; citizens stonewall. In this squeeze, individual tragedies are then politicised, stripped of context and recast as institutional cruelty.


The pressure does not stop at the booth level. Senior election officials, too, have found themselves under threat. In West Bengal, security around the office of the Chief Electoral Officer was tampered with, prompting the Election Commission to issue formal instructions to the Kolkata police commissioner. At the national level, vigilance has been stepped up to guard against tampering with SIR data itself. A process designed to protect the franchise is being forced to protect itself.


The deeper worry is institutional. When routine democratic procedures are portrayed as conspiracies, and when frontline workers are intimidated for doing their jobs, the legitimacy of the electoral system erodes. If voter-list revision becomes politically untouchable, rolls will decay, thus accumulating duplicate entries, dead voters and ineligible names. That outcome would serve only those who benefit from opacity.


Are the deaths of BLOs part of a coordinated political plot? There is no evidence to support such a claim. But it is equally hard to dismiss the possibility that sustained political messaging casting the SIR as a ‘threat’ has encouraged deliberate non-cooperation and harassment. In that sense, the tragedy lies not only in individual loss but in the transformation of civic duty into partisan resistance.


India’s democracy depends as much on the quiet integrity of its processes as on the noise of its campaigns. When even the voter roll becomes a battlefield, it is not the Election Commission that stands to lose the most, but the voter whose right to choose rests on the unglamorous labour of those now working under siege.

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