A remote, poverty-stricken island in Sunderbans now has its own English-medium school!
What began as a Saturday class has expanded into an English medium school with 350 students and 16 teachers.
No matter how much forward we move as a country, there’s still a part of us living in the areas with no access to basic necessities and education. The remote, poverty-stricken island in Sunderbans had the same story until one extraordinary woman took the initiative of change. Satarupa Mazumder, 46, a teacher by profession, visited Hingalganj, an island in Sundarban 9 years ago when her aunt wanted to donate a sewing machine to the community of women there.
Spending a day in the community, she came face to face with the problems of remote India. The kids were running around playing or rolling beedi with their parents, most of whom were beedi workers. Education was out of the question, as the only government school in the village was shut down. Learning about Mazumder’s profession, women in the community said to her, “Didi, kichu korun… aamra kichu korte chai.” (Didi, please do something, we want to make something of our lives.) Coming back home, she couldn’t stop thinking about the state of the children and the pleas of the mothers worried about their future.
Mazumder was an economics teacher in a reputed school in Kolkata back then. She had a steady and well-paying job, but thinking about the children in the area started a war between her brain and heart. She decided to do something about it, and every Saturday morning, she left for Hingalganj after teaching in the Kolkata school all week. “She used to take a cab to Howrah station to take the 6:20 a.m. train that would reach Hasnabad railway station at 8:20. She would then go by cycle-rickshaw up to the bank of the river Dasha, a tributary of the Ganga, take a ferry across, get to the other side, and then take an auto-rickshaw to reach the makeshift school in the village by around 9 a.m. She would teach there until 3 p.m., when it was time to start back, and then do the whole rickshaw-ferry-rail trip back to Kolkata,” as per The Hindu.
This is how she started and soon trained a few women in the village who could teach with her. She paid them with own salary. The Saturday classes went on for six years until 2018, when Mazumder made a choice and quit her job back in Kolkata. She used her provident fund to buy land to start an English medium school in Hingalganj. They named it Swapnopuron, ‘Fulfilment of Dreams’, and it now teaches 350 pupils from Classes Nursery to IX. The school has now five branches in total with 16 teachers, who just like her quit their stable jobs to come to teach in the island. “It is a collective dream. I feel so grateful that all the teachers share the Swapnopuron vision,” says Mazumder in the interview with Vasanthi Haripraksh for The Hindu.
The pandemic and consequent lockdown affected the income of the parents sending their children to school. Swapnopuron reduced the fees from ₹200 to ₹150 this year, so the students don’t drop out. Soon they are planning to open their doors for Class X students and want them to find a well-paid livelihood on the island without having to migrate to bigger cities.
The island where the kids didn’t even have any access to formal education now has an English medium school, all thanks to Satarupa Mazumder. Her efforts have brought a light of hope to the people of Hingalganj, especially the mothers who were concerned about their kids. She sacrificed her steady job and made an adjustment in her familial life so that these children have a future and don’t fall into the line of work the same as their parents. Not everyone has the courage and determination to do so, and we applaud Satarupa for taking such a brave step.
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