A SCHOOL WITH A DIFFERENCE FOR CHILDREN WITH SPECIAL NEEDS

Through patience, love and care, Deepalaya School has been working miracles in the city slums, reports Osama Manzar
Since the day they were born, five-year-old Jyoti and Sanjeev were children under a shadow, unable to speak. Then a volunteer from Deepalaya, a voluntary organsation, turned up at their slum and convinced their parents to admit Jyoti and Sanjeev in Dee palaya School. Within a few months the children started to speak. Love and care had accomplished a miracle.
Hugging her class teacher, Jyoti comes up with, “Aaj main kela aur seb kha kar aayee hun” (today I ate bananas and apples in breakfast). Says Ver sha Verma. Principal of this English-cum-Hindi medium school, “It is not that we provide them medical treatment, but, yes, we talk to them a lot and very lovingly.”
Jyoti and Sanjeev are among the 14 “special children” so called because of their special need for love and care. The special children have their own classroom and are among 650 children of this “formal school” of Deepalaya, situated in the Sanjay Colony of Okhla Industrial Area, being run in two shifts,. from Lower KG to Class VIII, following the NCERT curriculum with English as medium of instruction. Spread in about more than
2,000 sq ft, the architecture of the school is environment friendly, a creation of the famous developmental architect, Anil Laul. Says TK Mathew, the chief executive of Deepalaya, “We are concerned about the half-naked, malnourished, deprived and uncared-for children who live in the slums of Delhi.” The deep (lamp) which was lit up 15 years ago, in 1979, with seven kids from a slum near Chittaranjan Park, is now lighting the world of 15,000 children and their families from 29 slum clusters, in one way or the other. “Our focus in the early years, was on education since we firmly believed that a society deprived of education was deprived of progress,” says Md Firoz, a communication executive.
l4owever, after having a better Understanding of the situation and experiencing a deeper involvement with the community, they “realised that education alone was not enough and that a conducive family and community environment were necessary, for the child’s development”. Consequently, through the child, they reached his family and then the commu nity and are now “foreseeing the society’s transformation”.
The hard work of Deepalaya at the grassroots level has ensured sufficient resources, so much so t their budget as of today is no less than Rs 4 crore. While the contribution of the Ministry of Human Resource and Development is a paltry Rs 1.65 lakh, most of the funds come from Plan-International USA, AIDET Action France, Inter Church Coordination Committee (ICCO), Netherlands and Save the Children Fund, UK, beside the sponsorship schemes, which started in 1990.
Interestingly, even in the sponsorship schemes, 9,400 sponsorship cases out of a total of 145,000 children, are being sponsored by foreigners. Only 600 kids are sponsored by Indians, totalling the sponsorship cases to 10,000. The sponsor ship charge of Rs 1,600 per child per annum takes care of the child’s education, health, books and stationeries, uniform and nutrition, from the Baiwadi stage upto Class VIII. By the time the child reaches Class VIII, it is claimed that the child is instilled with enough confidence to pursue a career.
The community members themselves are drawn upon to participate, right from the identification of the needs, to the execution and evaluation of the programmes, thereby ensuring sustainable development. Unless the organisation becomes convinced that “from now on the community can take care of themselves”, Dee palaya does not phase out.
At present, Deepalaya is spread well over Tagore Basti and Gandhi Basti in West Delhi and Transit Camp, Govindpuri, Sanjay Colony and Gol Kuan, Kalkaji and Okhla Industrial Areas in South Delhi, broadly undertaking the responsibilities of community health, income enhancement and resource development, community organisation and education.