Inspite of the Right to Education Act, far too many children get left out of the school system as they have to contribute to the family kitty.

Madhabi Rai was enrolled in a primary school near Badauni in the Jalpaiguri district of West Bengal. But she attended school only on days when her mother did not go to work. Madhabi had to look after her three siblings and roll hundreds of bidis and stack them in bundles from the raw materials her mother brought home every evening.

Jitesh Roy of the same school had to carry lunch to his father, an agricultural labourer, four kilometres away, and work alongside him for extra income. So he often skipped school.

Madhabi and Jitesh began to lag behind in studies. Eventually, they joined the ranks of dropouts.

At a primary school in Krishnanagar near Badauni, a single teacher handles all the classes. The two other teachers on the rolls are absent. Since no classroom can accommodate all the children, classes are held under a tree. Of the 350 children on the register, only about 50 are present.

This is the ground reality despite the 86th Amendment of the Constitution and the more recent Right to Education Act.

Others factors operate, too. Over-age children, found wanting in age-specific learning competencies, feel embarrassed to attend school amongst better-equipped contemporaries. As girls approach puberty, the absence of toilets and the fear of premature sex make parents keep them home.

This is where the bridge course comes in. It is a process of socio-psychological community reconditioning delivered through short-duration condensed programmes that address the multiple needs of over-age, out-of-school children to raise their academic competencies and mainstreams them into formal schools at age-appropriate levels.

Offering a compressed learning package based on the formal school syllabus, the programme is customised by each agency to meet the needs of the community it is working for. It has bridged the gap between community and formal schools, parents and children, schools and children in a multi-pronged exercise.

The bridge courses in different parts of the country have been fashioned to meet different regional needs as well. There is no "one-size-fits-all' package. But most programmes introduced basic reading, writing and arithmetic at levels needed to send the children to school within a few months.

Community ownership has played a crucial role in the overall success of the bridge course programmes. Most centres are being run during regular school hours to introduce the children to the discipline of school timings. Secondly, this prevents formal school children from using these like free tutorial centres.

However, for a large number of children engaged in activities that clashed with regular timings (which led to dropping out in the first place), efforts are made to accommodate their income-generating hours rather than risk their dropping out.

In a tug-of-war between work and education, the latter will always lose. This flexibility has encouraged more children to attend these centres and move on to regular school.

The programme has proved to be not just a strategy to bring children into schools but also a dynamic process bonding the community, schools, parents and children. Apart from putting children in schools, it has inculcated a sense of responsibility and commitment in the community

The project has facilitated revitalization of community aspirations by reopening the clogged avenues of education for outof- school children. Education is no longer seen by the addressed community as the sole responsibility of the parents, and by the parents as a state responsibility alone or an activity enjoying lower priority than wage-earning. It is a concept that is worth popularizing and replicating in order to ensure the right to education remain no distant dream for working children.

By Annam Suresh