A model tribal school in Maharashtra battles water scarcity to fight migration
Six-year-old Ananya Gavit can write with both hands, read English textbooks for sixth grade and recite articles from the Constitution of India. Like him, 59 children who come to Zilla Parishad School in Hiwali, a remote tribal hamlet in Tryambakeshwar taluka in Maharashtra’s Nashik district, find a second home here. They are protected from seasonal migrations. The school operates 12 hours a day, 365 days a year and provides two meals a day to all enrolled children. No weekends, no public holidays. Teachers and students also come every day, many coming from as far as 22 km away. In fact, a parent from a tribal area 110 km away from this school rented a room in the hamlet to guarantee his child’s education. The school is proud to have a zero dropout rate. The focus is on activity-based, experiential, and hands-on learning with an emphasis on vocational training and agriculture. Children are also preparing for competitive exams.
The impact of the school and the attention it received led to the transformation of the entire village. Hiwali has been declared as a zero dependency village by Zilla Parishad. Villagers initiated community programs. They started sending all their children to school. Now the girl’s name is on the sign on every house. So far, teachers from 128 schools in Nashik have visited this tribal school to emulate the model.
But the school is currently struggling with water scarcity, a problem that frightens teachers. They fear that if the problem is not addressed, it will undo years of painstaking efforts and hard work to integrate children into the mainstream and lead to re-migration among children. Their wishes; a KT dam and solar energy. A KT dam or Kolhapur Type Weir is a low-cost, gravity-based river bed structure developed in Kolhapur that acts as a small dam or barrage to store post-monsoon river flow for irrigation and water supply.
“Earlier, we used to see the seasonal migration of children with their families while their parents went to the cities to find daily wage work. But now one of the parents stays behind to bring their children to school. A parent from Surgana, 110 km away from here, rented a room in the hamlet so that his child would not be deprived of education even for a day. Children come in the morning, have breakfast, learn and play here, have lunch, sleep for a while in the school, and do professional work. Keshav Kalibai Chandar, the teacher who is known for changing the course of the school, is “Get an education, learn local arts, farm, eat something and then go home,” Gavit said.
unique school
It is a unique school in terms of its style of pedagogy and the level of participation of children. It was carefully constructed over the last two decades to bring children of tribal laborers into mainstream education using innovative tools. Open classes are available and children are encouraged to change groups and classes for community work. Not even a centimeter of the school building was left empty. Every corner is used to spread educational concepts. There are drawings of the solar system on the roofs. The columns contain shapes and letters in 15 different languages. There are maps and mathematical equations on the walls, among other things. There is a computer lab, a community hall, and several farms. A separate shed serves as a workshop for children’s vocational training. They are taught abacus, plumbing, electrical wiring, welding, masonry, vermicomposting, cooking, among other skills.
FLN, or Basic Literacy and Numeracy, is excellent, which takes into account the basic skills in reading, writing and basic mathematics that children need to master around Grade 3 to be successful in school and life. For example, a first grader is expected to read small sentences consisting of four or five simple words. Here, our first grade students read books for 5th and 6th graders. While they are expected to know numbers up to 99, they know four-digit numbers, solve the addition and subtraction of six-digit numbers, and can multiply two-digit numbers with single-digit numbers. Within the scope of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, these skills are given importance in terms of learning, cognitive development and life outcomes parameters.
The man behind the school
When the school first opened in 1998, it was a one-teacher school for a tribal hamlet and had 16 students. However, with the appointment of Keshav Gavit in 2009, the school turned into a school with three teachers. The number of applications increased 5 times. The highest point of success is the complete stopping of child migration and zero school dropout rate.
Mr. Gavit himself is a tribal from a nearby village and worked as a daily wage laborer before preparing for competitive exams. When he failed the Maharashtra State Public Service Commission exam, he took the exam to become a teacher. In his teaching journey, he tried to apply what he learned from his failure while preparing for competitive exams and devised various measures to aid children’s experiential learning. “Now both parts of the children’s brain are activated. Even if they read a completely different poem while writing, they can write different content in two different languages at the same time with both hands,” he said.
Teachers now fear that the efforts of the last two decades will go in vain if the ongoing problem of water scarcity is not addressed. Gavit said, “The water shortage needs to be solved urgently for sustainability. We receive a lot of rainfall, but water cannot be stored because we are on a slope. If water can be stored, people will not need to migrate. We need water very much. We have pumps, but there are frequent power outages, so we cannot use the pumps to draw water. We want a small dam and solar-powered pumps to solve our water problem.” Work on deepening the well under the Jal Jeevan Mission is currently ongoing, but there is no proposal for the construction of a small dam.
When asked, Nashik Chief Executive Omkar Pawar said: Hindu It was stated that work is continuing to install a line to provide tap water to every household. “There are hard rocks in this region. Therefore, there are difficulties in storing water. There is heavy rainfall, but the water cannot be preserved. But if the village wants a small dam, the management can definitely help with this. This is an exemplary school for us. We are proud of it. The fact that the children receive such a good education is entirely at the discretion of the teachers. We will want the school to develop,” he said.
It was published – 22 December 2025 02:07 IST
