This story is from September 17, 2016

Slumtorials: Powering education dreams of the less fortunate

Slumtorials: Powering education dreams of the less fortunate
A session at Hafiz Institute, which is attended by 70 students. The tutorial has three teachers, two of whom are BMM students.
Mumbai: The irony is hard to miss. New Life is located above a slaughterhouse. English Dreams is wrongly spelt as Inglish Dreemz. But these slumtorials, today the mainstay in Mumbai’s bustees, are catering to thousands chasing a transformation that will pull them out of their jhopris.
Largely located above a tailor shop or a butchery, a hotel or a clothes store where rent is low, tutorials in slums are mostly single classroom entities with walls plastered with tiles similar to those in public urinals.
Then there are the more ambitious kinds; the ones that charge a bit more because, a few seasons ago, a student or two had bagged distinction. They divide their room into two using a curtain and set aside a few benches for the “super” batches or students who are likely to “create history” again.
Sai Coaching Class, Temple of Education, in Malvani is one example. Getting to the class isn’t easy. A narrow flight of stairs without a railing would see women who came to drop their kids screaming about the difficulty, till its owner Vishwanath Pillai tethered a rope that could be held on to.
while going to and from class.
But the story changed in 2015-16 when SCC student Divya Poojari scored 93% and became the tutorial’s brand ambassador. Pillai says the class was earlier his home, and his table was the kitchen’s platform. “I started this when I realized that students who were not doing well in school dropped out and there was hopelessness all around.”
Like mainstream tutorials, slumtorials also have their crash courses, revision batches and mock tests. But interestingly invention, the need of the hour, violates the authority of tradition. Several slum classes also double as daycare centres where mothers leave their children to rush to apartments for daily chores of sweeping and dusting. From KG to PG, one tiny room holds tuitions for everyone from classes I to IV at the same time and one teacher is exclusive for students from junior KG to Class VII. Senior classes then have an hour allotted each.

D S Classes in Chikalwadi has 95 students. Bashir Ahmed Sheikh has students from English, Hindi and Urdu medium schools. “Students come here because the level of teaching in classes is better than in schools. Also, in most cases, parents are not educated, so they want to send their children for even lower classes as there is no support system at home,” says Sheikh. Earlier, he would teach students at the local school and everyone would sleep on the campus and vacate it during school hours. Soon, Sheikh rented out a premises and thus started D S Classes.
“This is the story of most slum classes,” says Prajesh Trotsky, a consultant to several slum coaching classes. Teachers are sourced from local schools; sometimes college-goers take up teaching positions. At Hafiz Institute, Sangamnagar, of the three teachers, two are second-year BMM students, and 70 students, from kindergarten to class X, attend the tutorial.
Abdul Hafiz Khan has divided the class into two; he also runs a computer training centre which has about 30 candidates on its rolls. “The economics is simple. Most classes in the slums charge between Rs 6,000 and Rs 8,000 for senior classes like IX and X. The fee is lower for junior children. Teachers are paid on an hourly basis and a class makes anywhere between Rs 75,000 and Rs 1 lakh a year in profits,” adds Trotsky.
While there is no official count of coaching classes in slums, Trotsky gestimates that every slum pocket has an average of 30 classes. Vice president of the Maharashtra Coaching Classes Owners’ Association, Narendra Bhambwani, says they have lost count of tutorials now. “The classes in slums and their demand mirrors the fact that India’s poor has a quest for quality education. At the same time, it questions the kind of teaching-learning that takes place in government schools,” opines Bhambwani. Till then New Life buzzes with activity and Inglish Dreamz zings up the locality and lives by its motto: Become International.
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