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Lessons from Loreto Sealdah
How a gutsy Irish nun
transformed a Kolkata institution into a haven for the underprivileged
One of the most powerful
drivers of the CSR movement could well be the thousands of schools
dotting the country. Schools enjoy what most corporate houses do
not. They possess scale; a single school in excess of a thousand
students is probably the equivalent of 20 medium-sized companies in that
pin-code. They are a benevolent command economy; one instruction can
make the entire school fall in line within minutes.They are idealistic;
they believe they can make the world a better place well before cynicism
creeps in. They represent an efficient three-tier decision
implementation pyramid (headmistress, teachers and students), enhancing
effectiveness over multi-tiered management structures.
A few
decades ago, Sister Cyril of Loreto Sealdah in Kolkata leveraged these
realities in a lateral way. This Irish-born principal of a prominent
school in an under-privileged neighbourhood would notice
how, even as it offered premium education to the well-to-do, an even
larger community of girls literally adjacent to the school's gates would
never be able to access its educational facilities. So Sister Cyril
resolved that she would provide these children with an English-medium
education for free.
What Sister Cyril was proposing was
unique.Most schools would have grudgingly agreed to provide free
after-school supplementary classes; no school would have agreed to
provide under-privileged girls with real-time education.Most schools
would have had parents protesting about the social mismatch; Sister
Cyril was stubborn enough to stand her ground, which sent out a Morse
that `You may take your children to another school if you want, but this
is what I will do!' The accountants could have pointed out
infrastructural inadequacy and revenue squeeze; Sister Cyril felt that a
combination of cross-subsidy, space modification and teacher adjustment
would prove effective.
It pays to be occasionally pig-headed.
Loreto Sealdah may have started as a drop-in school for under-privileged
children but after a four-yearold Project Rainbow student was raped on
the pavement outside. Sister Cyril put her boot down: the girls would be
provided residence as
well. Residence? Where was the space in the middle of a crowded Sealdah
to house more than 700 girls? So Sister Cyril re-used class rooms for
the education of under-privileged once the main school was finished for
the day.Then came the accommodation argument; Sister Cyril got the
children to slide desks against the wall that would transform a
classroom into a living room. Then came the food issue. The older girls
helped prepare meals and the following morning these children rearranged
classroom desks, had a bath in the school toilet, slipped into fresh
uniforms and were off to study.
You'd think that such an
arrangement would have been a dream story. Read what happened instead:
the children missed the freedom of the streets; their usual complaint
was `Aa
make roj shokale chaan korte bole aar baire jete daai na!' (We are asked
to have a bath every day and are prevented from stepping out). The
teachers were `educated' to Bengali slang. Parents stepped up their
opposition to the idea of street children studying shoulder-to-shoulder
with their own.
Sister Cyril turned on the charm offensive; she
appealed to the parents' sense of charity; she arranged funding from
Ireland and Switzerland; she roofed and tiled the terrace to create a
single-roomed `home' for 700 children; she convinced fee-paying students
to become teachers; she re-designed the school time-table so that girls
from Classes V to X would invest two hours each week as a part of their
work education commitment.
What started as a cottage
experiment in Kolkata's seasoned academic environment is now a case
study. Of Loreto Sealdah's 1,250 students, 700 are from the streets.
What was considered as an idea destined to fail has been extended to six
Loreto schools in Kolkata. What used to be a neighbourhood spilling
over with street children is now near-free of this reality.
The
individual success stories that Loreto Sealdah has turned out are
inspirational. Padma's father died when she was three; her mother worked
as a domestic help; she collected free khichdi from Mother Teresa's
House to sustain the family. The durwan at Loreto Sealdah put in a word,
Padma was enrolled in Project Rainbow (the name by which Loreto Sealdah
ran the project), completed her school, proceeded to her Masters and
went on to work with Vodafone.Her elder sister Mandira was similarly
educated and is now settled in Dublin.
Another student Shireen
confessed she would have to discontinue because the family resources
needed to be saved for food instead.She was absorbed into the Rainbow
programme, passed her Madhyamik and Higher Secondary exams, graduated
from Loreto College and joined AMRI Hospital as a cancer documentation
specialist.
Time then for the schools of the country to draw
inspiration from a gutsy Irish nun and wake up to an opportunity sitting
literally at their doorsteps.
